Web search leader Google said this morning quarterly profit more than quadrupled, fueled by growth in search advertising.
But shares fell 5 per cent as revenue failed to match some high hopes, and the company said summer doldrums were hitting business.
Chief executive Eric Schmidt said the current quarter may not see the same 15 per cent sequential revenue gain Google posted last year, when results were boosted by a frenzy of media coverage leading up to its initial public offering.
For the second quarter, Google posted net profit of $342.8 million, or $1.19 a share, up from $79.1 million, or 30 cents per share, a year ago and topping average Wall Street targets by 7 cents per share.
But that fell short of recent outsize gains by Google, which went public in August and beat analysts' consensus profit estimate by 65 per cent in the quarter ended in March.
Google shares dropped to $297.25 after hours on Inet from a record close on Nasdaq of $313.94. Revenue, which comes almost exclusively from Web search advertising, was $1.38 billion, nearly double the $700.2 million in the year-ago period.
Analysts on average expected revenue of $1.32 billion in the quarter for Google, the biggest player in the global Internet advertising market, which has about $8 billion in annual sales.
On a sequential basis, revenue growth slowed to 10 per cent in the second quarter from 22 per cent in the first quarter.
Google went public last August at $85 a share and the stock had been on a steep and steady rise. Google paid out $494 million of quarterly revenue in fees - referred to as traffic acquisition costs - to sites that carry its ads.
Google rival Yahoo earlier this week posted a 40 per cent rise in revenue from a year earlier but failed to meet Wall Street expectations, raising concerns about the growth of online advertising.