Investors cheered the buyback plan, sending shares of the Google parent as much as 4% higher in after-hours trade before they pared gains to trade up 1.6%. Demand rose for cloud services and Google's ad sales held up better than expected. Alphabet reported a slight dip in first-quarter ad sales from a year earlier to $54.55 billion, which nonetheless beat analyst estimates of $53.71 billion. It was the third such decline for the company since it went public in 2004, but was the second in a row following a fourth-quarter ad sales drop of 3.6%. Alphabet's revenue for the quarter ended March 31 stood at $69.79 billion compared with estimates of $68.95 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

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