The company, which once started out as a humble collection of Web links, managed to triple its revenues and increase its profit seven times over.

First-quarter revenues reached $86m, up from $30.5m in the same period a year ago.

For investors this translates into earnings of 11 cents a share - clearly above the consensus forecast of market analysts, who had expected 8 cents a share.

Pro-forma earnings rose to $25.1m - sharply up from $3.3m in the first quarter of last year.

However, one-off costs are cutting into these profits, driving them down to $16.4m or 7 cents per share.

Tim Koogle, Yahoo!'s chairman and chief executive officer said the company experienced "strong organic growth across our global network of media properties" and reported a sharp rise in page views.

Page view blockbuster

Yahoo said traffic to its online properties averaged 235 million page views per day in March, up from 167 million per day in December.

The number of page views is one of the most important arguments to sell space to advertisers on the web.

Yahoo! recently expanded its catchment of Internet users by buying the Web community Geocities for $3.6bn. Another scoop was the merger with broadcast.com, a site specialising in streaming audio and video material in a deal worth $5.7bn.

Mr Koogle said the expansion would would add substantially to Yahoo!'s advertising and audience base.

The costs of these acquistions, however, had no bearing on the first-quarter results, and anyway much of it will be paid for with Yahoo! shares, currently trading at $208.