Google’s stock rose about 3 percent Thursday after its top executives spent half a day reassuring Wall Street analysts about the search giant’s long-term growth prospects.

“We define the market we’re in as the entire worldwide advertising market,” CEO Eric Schmidt said during Google’s analyst day event at its Mountain View, California, headquarters. And Mr. Schmidt said that market was bigger than he expected.

The event came just two days after Google CFO George Reyes spooked investors—and touched off a broad market sell-off—by saying Google’s breakneck growth rate might slow down. He also said the company was looking for revenue from sources beyond the online search ads that currently generate about 99 percent of its sales (see Google Warns of Slower Growth).

During Thursday’s event, Mr. Reyes spoke reassuringly of the strength of Google’s international operations, which saw sales double during 2005. He noted Google had advanced in Japan and Korea, opened offices in Israel and India, and was growing Latin American operations through its offices in Mexico and Brazil.

Mr. Reyes said the company was strongest in Western Europe—Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy—with Japan and Canada not far behind.

The company also trotted out Kai-Fu Lee, vice president of engineering and president of Google China, on stage. Despite the public row in the United States over Google’s agreement to censor its Chinese-language site to appease the Chinese government, he said Google is extremely popular on the mainland.

When Mr. Lee held lectures in Chinese universities he had audiences of 3,000 students. Some students paid as much as $60 to get in.

Earlier this week, Google announced it was keeping its data files off China’s turf to help shield them from the Chinese government. But the company said it agreed to filter out terms like “freedom” because it was the only way it could do business in the booming Chinese market (see Google Moves Files from China).

Multilingual

Google’s executives reiterated several times that the search giant’s services were available in 42 languages, but Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of technology, took a swipe at those that accuse the company of having imperialist aspirations. During a question-and-answer session, he promised the company wasn’t currently planning to conquer the world.

Even before the schmoozing ended, Google shares rose $11.65 to close at $376.45—still below the $390.88 they drew before Mr. Reyes’ cautionary remarks earlier in the week, and 21 percent below the all-time high of $475.11 set on January 11.

Morningstar Analyst Rick Summer labeled the event a “corporate marketing message.”

“It was certainly encouraging,” he said. “But it would be much more productive for us to have an understanding of long-term goals. In spite of facts and a lot of data analyses, there wasn’t a lot of visibility.”

He cited the example of Google’s strategy regarding its move into the local market, the new battleground where Internet companies are competing with centuries-old yellow pages publishers for small and midsize advertisers. The Kelsey Group predicts that local search will hit nearly $13 billion in 2010, up 300 percent from $3.4 billion in 2005.

He said he would like the company to be clearer about how Google defined success in the space. “Every single initiative seems to exceed management’s expectations,” he said.

During the presentations, Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, said local search will be one of the most monetized areas. “There are several opportunities in the ad market,” he added.

Even though he was bullish on local, he refused to say what the next big revenue generator could be for the company, saying instead that there was still a lot to improve in the short term.

“If we could improve our click-through rate by 5 percent, the next day our revenue would be 5 percent more,” he said.