With Facebook nipping at his heels in video, European regulators pressing for antitrust measures and its search engine market share stagnant, Google has been under a lot of pressure this year. But you wouldn’t know it from the quarterly earnings report released this afternoon.

Google reported second-quarter earnings of $6.99 per share on $17.73 billion in revenue, up 11 percent over the same quarter last year and handily beating consensus estimates of $6.70 per share. Cost per click revenue fell 11 percent year-over-year, but aggregate paid clicks jumped 18 percent.

Google didn’t appear to feel the pain from the surging value of the dollar overseas, which many companies have cited recently as a drag on revenues, although it did say that absent the currency fluctuations its revenues would have risen 18 percent.

In after-hours trading, Google’s Class C stock was up nearly 8 percent.

Google doesn’t break out revenue from its cloud computing business, but it reported “other revenues” of $1.7 billion in the quarter, up 17 percent over the same quarter last year. The category presumably includes the Google Cloud Platform.

The real star of the earnings report, however, was the suite of Google websites, which grew 13 percent to $12.4 billion, impressive growth on such a large base in a market in which advertising margins are shrinking.

Analysts were also impressed by Google’s cost control measures in its first earnings report since the appointment of Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, a former Morgan Stanley executive. Although operating expenses were up 21 percent, that was less than the 30 percent of the previous two reporting periods. The rate of hiring has slowed as well.

Porat has been expected to bring financial discipline to a company that has been criticized for its past investments in long-term bets like self-driving cars and wearable computers. She apparently is doing just that, as operating expenses as a percentage of revenues rose only slightly to 36 percent from 35 percent year-over-year.

““We are focused every day on developing big new opportunities across a wide range of businesses. We will do so with great care regarding resource allocation,” Porat said in a statement.

With Facebook and Amazon both reporting positive earnings surprises in the first quarter, there is growing evidence that the maturing Web is consolidating power in the hands of a few big players. Both companies are expected to report second-quarter results next week. Google has set the bar pretty high. Now the battle moves to mobile.

Photo by Robble Shade via Flickr