Yippee for Yahoo!

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When your corporate moniker is anchored by an exclamation point, folks expect exciting things from you. For Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), a fivefold surge off its 2002 lows practically demanded something great.

Yahoo! delivered.

Gravity was denied as the portal powerhouse earned $0.14 a share on $757.8 million in March quarter revenues. That sailed past Wall Street targets and made minced meat out of last year's $0.08 a share in profits on $282.9 million in revenues.

Even if you back out the more than $200 million that Yahoo! had to pay back to websites for allowing it to serve up its Overture ads, you are left with $550 million in high-margin revenues. In fact, there was good news all around as the company generated a jaw-dropping $197 million in free cash flow for the period and raised its balance sheet cash to $2.8 billion.

Forced to find a fault, one could carp on the fact that the bellwether's fee revenues only climbed by 39% while the number of paying relationships for its premium services doubled, but why rain on the parade? That's a small part of the company's well-oiled engine, and it's an incomplete knock.

And Yahoo! isn't looking back. It declared a 2-for-1 stock split as confidence springs eternal, and the company now looks to produce a full-year operating profit as high as $625 million. Revenues, excluding the Overture-related traffic acquisition costs, will come in between $2.4 billion and $2.5 billion.

Now that the dot-com bust has cleared away most of the pretenders, the Internet can be a pretty compelling place for your investing dollar. For some time now, leaders like eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) have earned favorable recommendations in our Motley Fool Stock Advisor newsletter. Paid search specialist FindWhat.com (Nasdaq: FWHT), which followed Yahoo! higher in after-hours trading last night, is up 70% since being singled out four months ago in Stocks 2004.

Yes, Yahoo! has got some pretty long coattails these days. Cool threads, indeed.

What did you like most about Yahoo!'s earnings report? What did you like the least? Will Google going public help or hurt the company? All this and more -- in the Yahoo! discussion board. Only on Fool.com.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz does Yahoo! but not the stock. He does not own shares in any company mentioned in this story.