On another day of hysterically wild swings – when the stock market – as a proxy for the global economy – badly needed a comfort blanket – Google gave it one.

It came in Thursday with Q3 net earnings of $1.56 billion, or $4.92 a share (non-GAAP), up 26%, on revenue of $4.04 billion less TAC. Total revenues came to $5.54 billion, up 31% year-over-year but, tellingly, up only 3% sequentially.

Analysts were only expecting $4.75 and $30 million more in revenues. Of course expectations are low.

US paid clicks were up 18%.

Google’s site revenues were an in-line $3.67 billion and its network revenues a little short at $1.68 billion. The company’s CAPEX spending has been reined in 18%.

After scrapping as low as $309 Thursday – because of worries about advertising in a recession – it shot up close to $390 in after-hours trading.

By way of outlook Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement that “while we are realistic about the poor state of the global economy, we will continue to manage Google for the long term, driving improvements to search and ads, while also investing in future growth areas such as enterprise, mobile and display.”

On the conference call, he described the economy as increasingly worse over the last month thrusting companies into “uncharted territory” but he expressed confidence that Google, with a close eye on cost, wouldn’t feel the economic sting as much as others since people are using search for, say, comparison shopping. So search is claiming “a lot of our investment” to make ads more relevant, personalized and targeted.