Google has reported a 26 per cent rise in profits and is making datacentre improvement the focus of capital expenditure in the next quarter.

The company is not being hit by the downturn, according to chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, but is cutting costs.

The bulk of the $452m spent last quarter went on datacentre improvements, and Pichette explained that this trend would continue.

"We are investing heavily in datacentres and will continue to do so," he said. "With the new equipment we can do a lot more today with less."

Of the 500 new employees the company has hired over the past quarter, over half were engineers.

Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, reasserted the company's plans to invest in infrastructure and new application development. He said that Google had added more than one improvement a day to the company's technology portfolio.

"Energy efficiency is a key area for us," he said. "We now use several times less power in our datacentres than typical facilities with the same number of computers in other facilities."

The rate of page indexing had speeded up, Brin said, adding that every four hours Google indexes the equivalent amount of information as is contained in the Library of Congress.

Google Maps and Google Earth are also major areas of opportunity, particularly user generated features. Already 56,000km of roads and 75,000 business listings had been added by users.

Brin is expecting strong sales of phones using the Android mobile operating system, and said that he had been using one as his primary phone for a few months now and was very impressed.

Development on the Chrome browser would also continue, despite lacklustre take-up.

"We will continue to improve it and we have open sourced it entirely," he said. "It raises the bar for all browsers, which is good because we want all browsers to improve."