Wall Street applauded, sending the shares up nearly 8% to $458.22 in early trading Friday.

The Net search giant made $2.62 a share on an adjusted basis on net revenue of $1.87 billion, which reflects payments made to search ad partners.

Analysts were looking for EPS of $2.42 on sales of $1.81 billion.

"Our third-quarter results are a testament to the strength of our network of advertisers and partners, as well as our continuing focus on users," said CEO Eric Schmidt. "We were particularly pleased with the contributions of our international business in a seasonally weaker quarter."

The news comes a couple days after the latest disappointment from rival Yahoo! (YHOO - commentary - Cramer's Take), whose shares hit a 52-week low Wednesday.

The company said revenue at Google-owned sites grew 84% to $1.63 billion, representing 60% of total revenue.

Operating expenses, other than cost of revenue, rose to $710 million from about $395 million a year earlier. These operating expenses included $382 million in payroll-related and facilities expenses, $98 million in stock-based compensation, and $50 million in advertising and promotional expenses, of which $14 million was related to certain distribution deals.

Third-quarter capital expenditures were $492 million, the majority of which was related to IT infrastructure investments, including data centers, servers and networking equipment.