Google's business model health is gauged, not so much by how much profit it's making (these days the markets always know the expected profit and have factored it in) but in what direction on the chart its various lines are headed, and therefore how much money it's likely to pull in in the future.

For example, the stock market was mostly pleased (and therefore rewarded the cookie monster with an 8 per cent boost - to $959.65) that the line which charted paid clicks was growing fast enough to outpace the effects of the line that charted the downward yield of the average click.

In chasing the mobile market by making its mobile ads cheaper than its Web browser ads, Google had managed to win on volume what it lost on the per click price. This was pleasing.

Quite apart from that forward-looking stuff, it had also engineered a 23 per cent rise in Internet revenue to $10.8 billion in the third quarter. Against this it lost a hefty (to any other company) $248 million on its Motorola Mobility holding.

Like Facebook, Google has finally wrestled mobile to the ground. A year or two ago, mobile revenue was an elusive quantity: it now represents 40 per cent of Google's revenue.

YouTube has also gone mobile. In the earnings call participants were informed that 40 per cent of users YouTubed on their mobile phones compared to just 6 per cent two years before.

All of which has boosted the individual Google share to a gnats crotchet off the magic $1000 dollar mark. Just think, if only you'd spent a couple of hundred on Google shares a decade ago.