Google investors cheer split

Google’s stock split has investors doing cartwheels.

Much to the delight of Wall Street, the search giant delivered a two-for-one stock split and posted first-quarter results that topped analysts’ expectations yesterday.

Shareholders who had been angling for a form of dividend from the company will receive one share of a new stock for each share they currently hold. The new shares, which will be listed on the Nasdaq under a separate ticker, will hold no voting power, allowing co-founders Sergey Brin and CEO Larry Page to keep their grip on the company.

Google reminded investors that the founders set up the company’s dual-class voting system to ensure that they would maintain control.

“Our goal was to maintain the freedom to focus on the long term by ensuring that the management team, in particular Eric, Sergey and I, retained control over Google’s destiny,” Page said in a letter.

Google also put last quarter’s rare miss behind it, with $10.65 billion in revenue, a 24 percent jump over the year-ago quarter. Net income hit $2.9 billion, or $8.75 per share, up from $1.8 billion, or $5.51 a share.

Still, a closely watched metric — costs per click — continued to slide. Advertisers paid 12 percent less whenever users clicked on their Google ads last quarter compared with the previous quarter.

Google attributed the slide to several factors, including consumers increasingly searching on mobile devices.