The Google Finance site is filling a hole and is now set to battle with Yahoo, MSN and AOL for Financial information. With Yahoo being the most sought after site for Finance information on the market thus far.
On
entry into the main finance.google.com site, the user is presented with Market
Summaries of the Nasdaq, Dow, S&P 500, and NYSE. There is a list of the main Headlines for the day, pulled in from
a variety of news sources including Bloomberg, Macworld, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, and New York Times. [The front
page also tracks the stock quotes you check if you are logged into your Google account]. From the search box, you can type stock ticker id's, the will push you to a page dedicated to that company. Google Finance gives you the current stock price, delayed by about 15mins, with opening prices, highs, lows, and average volume. On this company specific page, Google pulls in news from a variety of sources that relate to this company. Again these are pulled from various sources including Forbes, CNET, Macworld, and ZDNet, as well as worldwide newspapers. There is a Company Summary, outlining all main company information pulled from the Reuters resources. In the Company Facts section, users can check out previous revenue earnings, profit margins, employee numbers, and company address. A managements section lists some of the main Officers, Directors, and VP's of the organization, and on mouse over, displays images, if available, age, bio, and trading activities.
Other interesting areas on the company specific page include the Related Companies area, which outlines, and links to related companies, their ticker number, and current price. A Blog Post area pulls in blog posts for the related company. Discussions, utilizes the Google Groups site to add some discussions and talk about the specific company. For more information relating to your company of choice, check out the More Resources section, which links to TheStreet, MSN Money, Wikipedia, MarketWatch, and Yahoo, and AOL Finance among others.
If you choose to not search by stock ticker id's, and type in a term like "cars", Google Finance will search its database, and pull up all "car" related company's and link out their specific page, pulling the information as above.
Good move for Google. This looks like a Yahoo Finance beater for sure. Everything is layed out extremely nice with the Google Finance interface, with ease of navigation, and plenty of information at your fingertips.
1. I think Google's strategy here can be summed up in one word: Pretty. Google Finance seems infatuated with the underpinning technology, at the expense of content. The slider thingis fun for moving the chart's timeline. But news stories don't go back very far in time, and they are *very* selective-- as opposed to Yahoo's zone-flooding approach. And Google's charts don't even go back very far; MSFT shows from 2001 to the present. That's nothing. I'm amazed, honestly, that this service is so incomplete. I'll keep using Yahoo! Finance.
Posted at 11:29AM on Mar 21st 2006 by Brad Hill