San Francisco, Apr 24 (IANS): Riding on online advertisement growth, Google's parent company Alphabet posted a net income of $9.4 billion in the first quarter this year -- a 73 per cent jump from $5.4 billion in the same period last year.

Advertising revenue soared 24 per cent to $26.6 billion while the total revenue was $31.1 billion.

"Our ongoing strong revenue growth reflects our momentum globally, up 26 per cent versus the first quarter of 2017 and 23 per cent on a constant currency basis to $31.1 billion," Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement late on Monday.

"We have a clear set of exciting opportunities ahead, and our strong growth enables us to invest in them with confidence," Porat added.

In Q1 2018, Nest joined forces with Google's hardware team.

In a call with analysts, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Nest sold more devices in 2017 than during the past two years combined.

However, what role "Nest," the smart home-device maker, along with an investment in Uber played in its gains are still a little tricky to tell, CNET reported.

Nest is part of Google's consumer devices division, run by hardware chief Rick Osterloh, who also oversees the "Pixel phone" and "Google Home speaker" devices.

According to CNN Money, Pichai downplayed the potential impact of the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by saying that most of its ad business is from search ads, which requires "very limited information" from users.