Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Google Finance

Google launches Google Finance, a search and info-portal for US stocks. You can search for both a company name (like “Google”), its stock market symbol (like “GOOG”), or a business (like “search”). Google Finance is now also linked to from the main Google web search when you search for stocks.

Individual entries, like the one on Google, show an interactive chart which is linked to news clusters from Google News. Click on a flag in the chart and to the right side, the news that spiked at this date is highlighted.

Also on the info page are a multitude of company facts, like the company address, a company summary, or management. Related links point to other companies, and blog posts covering this company. I’m not quite sure how Google determines which blog posts are worthy to be included here; at the moment, I can see e.g. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion being featured on GOOG.

Google also includes a discussion group for every company. These groups seem to utilize a customized version of Google Groups, and – according to the FAQ – are moderated (the community guidelines include the obvious “Do not spam”).

Whenever you visit one of the charts, a link to it is added to an overview list on the Finance homepage. You can also directly add stocks to a (private) portfolio to track them.

On the technical side, Google Finance is one of the few Google sites which make use of Flash. (Others are Google Analytics, Google Video and some Google advertisement micro-sites.) The Flash part on the screen nicely adjusts its width to your browser size.

It’s interesting to see how many services are tied together in the new Google Finance. There’s Google News, Google SMS, Google Groups, Google Blog Search, and the Google Account. External sources include Nasdaq, AMEX and NYSE (ranging from real-time inclusion to delays of up to 20 minutes). Reto Meier says, “It’s a solution that really provides a holistic view of not just what’s happening to the market – but why.”

[Thanks The Internet Stock Blog and Search-Engines-Web.com.]

Google Finance by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (27)

>> More posts

Advertisement