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"The stock is down because it wasn't a blow-out quarter as many of us expected," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Global Crown Capital. "They gained share relative to Yahoo in paid search revenue, but not by a wide margin."

Fourth-quarter net income nearly tripled to $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per share, from $372.2 million, or $1.22 per share, in the year-earlier quarter. That easily beat the average analyst estimate of $2.92 per share among analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue, meanwhile, surged 67% to $3.21 billion, from $1.92 billion a year ago. Nearly two-thirds of Google's fourth-quarter revenue came from its own sites.

Google is venturing into new ad formats beyond its traditional pay-per-click text ad business, including radio, video, newspaper and corporate brand ads.

For the fiscal year, Google's revenue exceeded $10 billion, becoming the fastest dot-com public company to reach that mark, Pyykkonen says.

The Silicon Valley company has exceeded analysts' forecasts in all but one of its 10 quarters as a publicly held company.

The company's stock, which has been flirting with $500 a share, rose 9% in January, compared with a 1% increase for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index in the same period.

Google's market value of $153.5 billion is more than four times that of rival Yahoo. Web traffic to Google sites jumped 24% year-over-year, says Nielsen/NetRatings. About 3 billion searches were performed on the site in December - about twice as many as on Yahoo, says Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google's technology isn't considerably different from rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft, says Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog. "They simply have a good brand," he says.

"Google's biggest concern is simply getting too big," Sullivan says. "Everybody thinks of them as those wacky kids in Mountain View (Calif.), but they're not. They're a 6,000-person company."

Jon Swartz, www.usatoday.com
Contributing: Michelle Kessler, Reuters