A quarter ago, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) “had no idea where the bottom was,” CEO Eric Schmidt said during the company’s earnings call Thursday. But now the business “appears to have largely stabilized,” he said, calling out the recovering performance of several verticals, including shopping and travel. (A notable exception was finance). Schmidt also noted the performance of the company’s YouTube division and its display advertising business—which both have had their performance questioned recently—saying both had “performed very well.” And how about a recovery? “Too early for us to tell,” Schmidt said.

Other highlights:

—YouTube: “Monetized views” on YouTube have more than tripled over the last year, said SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. Executives would not say whether YouTube was profitable, although they did say it was on a trajectory to become a “very profitable business for us” in the “not too distant future,” giving a collective heart attack to analysts who have speculated about how much money the site is losing. In a follow-up call with analysts, CFO Patrick Pichette said that the company wanted to reaffirm that YouTube’s business model was credible. “There’s been so much press with all these documentations of massive costs and no business model,” he said.