Google says that the advertising market is beginning to return to normal. And normal for them means close to a $2B quarterly profit.

Their latest earning release also highlighted a 17% year on year growth in revenues — now up to $6.67B per quarter — from $5.7B per quarter during the same period in 2008. Chief executive Eric Schmidt continues to make optimistic assessments of the current state of affairs.

“Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year,” he said. “Our performance in 2009 underscored the strength of our management team, the resilience of our business model and the pace of innovation within our product and engineering teams, which continued unabated throughout the downturn.”

In a sign that consumers are increasingly willing to spend, more Internet users clicked on ads. The number of paid clicks on ads served on Google’s Web sites rose 13% from last year and 9% from the third quarter of 2009.

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