Google mourned in China.

Search engine leader Google reported its highest earnings growth rate in a year yesterday, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The California-based company’s fourth-quarter earnings topped analysts’ estimates, but revenue figures only matched their forecasts. The total profit was $1.97 billion, a dramatic rise from $382 million dollars just a year ago. Total revenue amounted to $6.7 billion, reflecting a 17 percent increase since a year earlier. Revenue increased by more than 10 percent from the third quarter and was Google’s first double-digit, sequential growth figure since the start of the US recession in December 2007, reported The Press Association.

Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt described the fourth quarter as an “extraordinary end to a roller-coaster year” pushing different products including Google Apps suite and its Android mobile phone operating system. But the majority of its sales and profit grew from online advertisements, reported American daily newspaper USA Today.

Advertisers paid 5 percent more per click on advertisements served on Google’s website in the fourth quarter than they did a year ago, a figure 2 percent higher than it was in the third quarter. The rise in the number of Internet users clicking on advertisements reflected that more customers were willing to spend. The number of paid clicks on the advertisements rose 13 percent from last year and 9 percent from the third quarter of 2009, reported CNNMoney.com.

Google’s earnings growth announcement came just nine days after it claimed that a major cyber attack on its systems was traced to China, and threatened to pull out of the country all together if China continued its policy of censorship on search results. During a conference call with analysts and reporters, Schmidt said that the company was “quite committed to being in China” and Google will change its censoring policy “a reasonably short time from now” but gave no further details, reported The Wall Street Journal.

He added, “We like the Chinese people and our Chinese employees. We like the business opportunities there and we’d like to do that on somewhat different terms than we have.”

Earlier Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed global censorship and cyber attacks in a speech at the Newseum Journalism Museum in Washington and specifically called on China to conduct a thorough review of Google’s claims.