San Francisco - Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc on Thursday said its third-quarter profits jumped 26 per cent, as more people used Web search advertisements to increase sales amid the continuing economic downturn.

Google's net income rose to 1.35 billion dollars from 1.07 billion dollars, according to a company statement. Its revenue grew 31 percent to 5.54 billion dollars, up from 4.23 billion dollars a year earlier.

"We had a good third quarter with strong traffic and revenue growth across all of our major geographies thanks to the underlying strength of our core search and ads business," said CEO Eric Schmidt.

"While we are realistic about the poor state of the global economy, we will continue to manage Google for the long term, driving improvements to search and ads, while also investing in future growth areas such as enterprise, mobile, and display."

Ads that accompany Web searches and are targeted at online shoppers, are compelling advertisers to transfer budgets from TV and print media to the internet. Barclays Capital said that the internet will account for 8.7 percent of the 284 billion dollars in US ad spending this year, up from 7.2 percent in 2007, Bloomberg news reported.

"Google's going to continue to grow at a pace that's faster than everyone else," analyst Steve Weinstein at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon told Bloomberg. "They have a very profitable and still very rapidly growing core franchise in search."

In the company's words: "Google is the closest thing the Web has to an ultimate answer machine." Its name is a play on the mathematical term "googol," for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, and reflects its mission to organise the vast amounts of information available on the Web. (dpa)