Google announces Q4 2012 earnings

Google just announced its earnings for Q4 2012, and as expected, the company had another strong quarter. Google earned $14.42 billion in revenue, and scored a net income of $2.89 billion. Q4 2012 revenue is up an impressive 36% from the same time last year, and the net income is up just slightly from last year's $2.71 billion.

What's perhaps even more impressive is that Google hit $50 billion in revenue for the first time in 2012. Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired last year, earned a revenue of $1.51 billion during Q4 2012, but the bought-out company posted an operating loss of $353 million. While that's not a good sign, it certainly doesn't affect Google's earnings too much.

As far as how the revenue breaks down, Google reports that Google-owned sites generated revenues of $8.64 billion, while Google's partner sites scored $3.44 billion in revenue. Google revenues from outside of the US totaled $6.9 billion, which represents over half of Google's total revenue in Q4 2012.

Other miscellaneous details that Google included were that the company added around 350 employees in Q4 2012 alone, with a total head count of almost 54,000 employees — 16,000 of which are Motorola Mobility employees. And if you're interested in how much the company paid in taxes (because apparently people are into that now), Google's effective tax rate for Q4 2012 was 18%.