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Google defied analyst expectations today by announcing a 37% increase in revenue for the first quarter of 2010 and 23% year-over-year growth. Google's CFO Patrick Pichette told analysts on a call this morning that advertising was clearly waxing after a waning that almost looked like a permanent eclipse to many.

Net income rose to $1.96 billion ($6.06 a share) from $1.42 billion ($4.49) last year.

Web retailer Amazon announced their fourth quarter earnings today and included some interesting figures on the state of their distributed computing products. Namely, web services bandwidth now accounts for more bandwidth than all of Amazon's global web sites combined. To put this in perspective, comScore ranked Amazon the 7th most visited site in the US in December. The retail giant was 6th in the UK, 9th in Canada, 11th in Germany, 11th in Japan, and 20th in France. In other words -- Amazon is big, which means AWS-powered sites must be really big (collectively, at least).