Slashdot Mirror
Google Finance Beta Released
t3rmin4t0r writes "Forbes.com is reporting that google has rolled out a finance site. The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together. The Forbes article mentions that "Google had previously provided financial information through a framed page featuring information from Yahoo! Finance, Fool.com, MSN Money Central and ClearStation " and that the information is collected from various sources rather than a direct feed from the stock exchanges, making it probably less useful for buy & sell decisions.
"
It's exactly like Yahoo! Finance, only with no ads (Google can't put ads on beta sites for legal reasons) and cool Flash charting. This is probably the best financial site ever created.
I like it. Needs more features, but it's nice and easy to read. No clutter.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
This is just another thing google is getting itself into. This could be good or bad, depending on how you want to think about it. It's good that they are trying to broaden their scope on the internet further. The bad is that if they continue to stretch into different fields, they could spread themselves out too thin and could have it backfire on them. IMHO, they're a good company and I trust their products and services for the most part.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
For a second there I thought that Google had created some web application for people to track their personal expenses. That could be dangerous in a lot of ways.
Thanks. Now fuck off
"looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together."
Really? Check out their MSFT page - it really is a lot better organised than Yahoo's. Once they support Singaporean stocks (they already have lots of information), I'm gonna be all over these guys.
Good job, Google!
Hey, the storied search engine has a plain starting screen too. Where this is cool is when you get into the detail page for individual stocks. Check out the price graph, which is much richer than what Yahoo has -- you can hover for the closing price on specific days, click and drag to move around in the history, and zoom however you like.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
No stock news based on stocks in your portfolio... no real time quotes... no technical charting.. no options listings.
Besides a somewhat nifty chart -- which most pro sites have already gone far beyond -- this is not very noteworthy except that all things Google are news, right? I'd use Yahoo Finance to get information on Google's stock before I used Google Finance.
Sites like these provide important economic indicators that help you determine when its the right time to buy a car or a house or go Kwanzaa shopping. I wouldn't dare spend my money unless I felt that it was ok to do so.
I was just about to post a story about this. I went to pull up the info on a quote from my Google news page and saw the new format.
The main page may look plain, but the detail on a stock is beautiful:
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ig&q=AAPL
The stock ticker is draggable, like Google Maps, and shows a marker for each news item (listed on the side). Also, as you scroll the ticker (by dragging it), the news items change to show items relevant to the timeframe displayed.
I'd say well done Google.
Uhh...
Maybe if the submitter took a few steps beyond that first page, he'd see how mind-crushingly awesome this service is. I mean.. they made a crawler to actually get pictures of company officers?
Not to mention that their graphing software is really, really slick. Head and shoulders above Yahoo.
I would hardly call it 'hacked together', the graphing utility alone constitutes real UI thought.
Wow, that's just about nuthin'. The portfolio page asks for Stock, Amount, and Price, but not Trading Date (necessary to figure out annual yields). The resulting page doesn't list news for those companies, just the current stock price.
I use the Yahoo Finance page to track my portfolio. It's redundant with my actual brokerage page, but the brokerage is much more paranoid about automatically logging me out, so a simple check is often a pain. Fortunately, for me keeping the two in synch is easy because I trade only a few times a year.
Google's got a loooooong way to go before I abandon that. I have faith that they can, but for the moment I wouldn't call this Beta. Usually when Google calls something "Beta" it at least shows one cool thing. This is just a "me, too" page.
- The scrollable graphical price history is pretty neat. You can also easily expand the time horizon. There isn't really a lot you can do with it, but I think it's a fun little toy.
- Important links to each company are included: news, employment opportunities, investor relations, etc. It's nice to have all of those links in one place.
Bad:
- If you're looking for a lot of real information about a company's finances, you'll still have to go elsewhere. A few financial ratios are reported on each company's page, but after those few, you have to click on "more ratios from Reuters." Also, Yahoo has a LOT more data on every company. Here's an example of what I mean: company data.
- No analyst opinion page, like Yahoo has. Here's an example of what I mean: analyst opinion. I think it can be helpful to see how covering analysts view a company.
- Historical price data on Google finance only goes back to 2001. This shouldn't be too difficult to fix in the future.
I expect Google will work on these soon, but they have a long way to go to catch up now.
My userid is prime!
"seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together"
Yeah, in the same way google.com looks "quickly hacked together"
Just for fun I pulled up my 401k investments. The time line was nice, and the information was good. But I figured I'd check out the 401k's investment since I started investing in it. I clicked the 3yr link at the top of the chart and it made a pretty cool re-size effect, and the top bar changed too. Looks like you can click and drag either side of the total time line bar to change the zoom to any time period for the fund.
Pretty neat, and definitely not 'quickly hacked together'
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Just for a moment I paused and thought about it: Google knows all, so why not? They seem to be dabbling in everything else, why not fiances?
.
Following typical Slashdot logic:
1. Find candidate
2. Find other interested, lonely people matched by search history
3 ???
4. Profit
--MK
That's a great idea! My only request is that I get to be an Alpha.
This guy's the limit!
They say the mind is the first thing to
They just separated a separate "finance" section by channeling queries and news to it. Maybe this and google wallet might work together and something big happens.
I was checking the details of "Wipro Limited (ADR)"
a rch&hl=en
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=wipro&btnG=Se
Which states
Vivek Paul > Vice Chairman of the Board
Which is no longer true! Vivek Paul left Wipro some time back.
Damnit, that was supposed to have tags around it. I don't really think like that. I guess that's why they made the preview button.
So the comment is that its a sparse site, composed of data collected and aggregated from other sites? My God! What is Google thinking! Oh wait, thats what they do, and are pretty successful at it. Think about it - in your Gmail screen, theres a little bare-bones stock price ticker, or just summary of the prices for the day... that's what Google's doing - they want to be your portal.
Except they so far have kept the interface cool, ads to a minimum, and the functionality high.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Because, remember, everyone's equal! The ditchdigger is as valuable to a society as a doctor and we all should hug and chant Om and love each other!
Get a grip.
(Oh yeah--and pretty offtopic.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
It seems like this submitter has a problem with Google going into the post with remarks on how it looks "too plain" and "quickly hacked together". If by too plain the author means "simple and clean like most people like it" than I'd agree. I'm sure this wasn't the only article slashdot received on this since topic since it's been linked to on google.com all morning. I've got to wonder why this one made the site. I was going to write in about it, but figured it was non-news.
nothing
Add CM to my portfolio....
hmm.. "Could not find the requested symbol"
Right, and no symbol search for the noobs.. that's going to be convenient. Oh well, try Adding CM.TO instead.
"We will support international symbols soon"
Right. Then maybe I'll give it a try "soon". Back to yahoo for me. (Add this to the other complaints people are having)
-Moof
Enter a stock and see the page that comes up. Despite the fact it uses Flash it is actually nicely implemented. Drag the viewing range of the stock around and you will see the associated news entries change to show what happened in those periods - nice!
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Google is good at bringing info together. The links to many different sites in this case will work. All in all you'll get a less biased view.
How am I supposed to pump and dump? bash and stash?
I can't visit Yahoo finance anymore. The ads give me seisures.
This is exactly how Google killed them years ago.
No over the counter bulletin board stocks. Wake me up when they support em :P
Yes because they've been so innovative in selecting their non-search engine services. With their e-mail service, mapping service, and purchasing any interesting technology they see... Google succeeds by putting a Google 'plain and functional' web 2.0 veneer on the ideas of others. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I like google's simple approach and use quite a few of their services that doesn't mean they are the sole (or even primary) innovators in the web right now.
Would you prefer if there were obfuscated controls and banner ads?
Do you want to go ahead and quickly hack up a page like this:
http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=16701613
?
Google thrives on the simple and powerful interfaces they create. It's half of what got them where they are today.
I would think with Google's track record of recording and storing anything and everything they come across that people would be less than willing to provide them with your bank account information as well as all of the stock investments you have made. They're great, don't get me wrong I use them every day, but I don't trust them to index my entire hard drive and I certainly don't trust them with all my investment information.
I thought you had to pay a lot of money per user to display realtime quotes. Is Google really doing that, or are we about to seem them get slapped by the NYSE & Nasdaq?
That's a great idea! My only request is that I get to be an Alpha.
Sorry man, their motto is 'Do no gEvil.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
why not make the whole site Flash if you are going to base the (very important) charts on it
i was looking forward to some more DHTML enhancement with static images (eg. maps.google), instead we get a slow, plugin based site, and as Macromedia Flash is banned in a lot of companies who exactly is the target market ?
seems like others said, this was just hacked together, there are numerous flash charting components but i dot see them on Forbes,FinancialTimes,Yahoo, and just about any business orientated site why do you think that is ? if Flash was really the right tool we would see them everywhere by now
keep it clean
So, if I am logged in does it keep track of what stocks I watch? As a fun experiment I am currently investing in middle east ventures and companies as well as searching for random things like "plane", "bomb", "how_to_blow_up_usa", "nuculear_weapon_wholesale".... As well as using my gmail and email to send messages containing terms like, "praise allah" and "strike tonight!!". I leave my google toolbar open full throttle and use all the google apps, just to increase odds. Its nice to have another tool!
(just kidding about all that), but seriously... Take it from me, we should be watchdoging google AND the government here. I have to admit, if I was in the government and it was my job to protect the US, I would want to be a sneaky little twerp and spy on people... BUT, last time I checked we were supposed to be living in a democracy. I don't think its like the old days where we can do what the pilgrims ended up doing with England... I mean, they may not take Arkansas and Las Angelas, but the rest of the usa is severely under weapons if our government turns away from democracy. One tool they ARE behind on is the internet, but they are working hard to close the gap. I fear though, other countries and private corporations are far ahead in some aspects of internet espionage...
Oh, but about the new service... cool beans! Google freakin wrocks!
There's a good test to see whether a site is clean or just lacking features:
What do you want it to do that it doesn't already do?
Take a look at:
r ch
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=goog&btnG=Sea
Seems to me, they have some cool features that the other finance sites are lacking. I, personally, really like the site!
Some of you just stay on Google's nuts... Is this site really that serious yet? No! Sure it has potential but Yahoo is much further along so think before you worship Google just because they're Google.
No company is perfect and this site has shown nothing so far to convince me otherwise. Down the road, maybe. But for now I'm not going to allow let Google bust a nut on my face as they're doing with some of you "Google Groupies" out there.
The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together.
Obviously you didn't get past the first page which is thankfully as close to plain as it can be. Here's one very good argument for having a very plain front page: It loads fast. Then you get where you really want to be faster.
Even on the main page there's some technically cool stuff. Hover over the market indexes and the graph changes to the one you're hovering over. They've got that in a few places. Go to the main page for a ticker and hover over individuals listed in Management and it gives you more info. In fact, if you do it on the GOOG ticker, it even shows pictures in the pop-up.
Trying hovering over the graph and it gives you data specific to the day or time that you're hovering over in the upper right. You can scroll the graphs to look back in history instead of having to change the time periods. You can select a fixed time period like Yahoo, or you can drag the start and end of the time period for the graph. This is some cool stuff.
Now, when you call it "plain", what are you comparing it to? Yahoo? Because Yahoo isn't anywhere near this tricked-out. As for the data, it doesn't appear to be any more out of date than Yahoo's data. It has the real time ECN just like Yahoo and the rest of the market data is probably 15-20 minutes delayed just like every other free financial site on the web.
Personally, my first impression is that it's exceptionally well designed. It's a great first cut and barring any major disasters, I suspect I'll switch over to it from Yahoo Finance.
Google always gets products out in early forms and then updates them. That's their mantra. It will come together more...
Those obnoxious stock symbol links (AAPL) everywhere in Google News stories, then in all search results?
Stock Quotes Disclaimer You agree not to copy, modify, reformat, __download__, store, reproduce, reprocess or redistribute any data or information found herein or use any such data or.... how can i view data w/o downloading on my comp at least in memory? :-)
This sig doesnt exist.
Quote (allegedly from Forbes article):
"and that the information is collected from various sources rather than a direct feed from the stock exchanges, making it probably less useful for buy & sell decisions. "
This stinks of scraping the botton of the barrel to find something bad to say about Google. Unless you have direct exchange feeds and are in constant direct contact with officers in all the listed firms, you're always getting information collected from various sources, whether you're Yahoo or Google or some guy at Starbucks.
As to use for "buy & sell" decisions, that comment smacks of the contempt that firms like Forbes have for consumers. They have one type of trade in mind, where you use information fresh from analysts who are plugged into a stock, and call the correct time to buy exactly. In reality, very few trades hinge on the few minutes or even hours that secondary news sources take to publish the news from primary sources. Exceptions might be IPOs (which are hard to get into for other reasons anyway), really bad news for a stock (in which case panic selling or even trading being halted by the exchange would be bigger factors), and intraday or tick-based selling (for which sources like Forbes, or Yahoo, or Google aren't even relevant anyway, since you need a live tick feed from someone like Thomson or Reuters).
A dating service!
I rarely do a trackback on a particular share to get the price on a past date or time-frame. The monthlu fluctuations of the stock market are interesting, but not really a big concern for someone who is probably going to do a day trade.
Also there is the fact that Yahoo! offers real-time streaming quotes for premium paid users. And that group is going to decide where the money flows, not the average techie who can switch finance sites depending on what is cool this week.The information is collected from various sources rather than a direct feed from the stock exchanges, making it probably less useful for buy & sell decisions.
Yes, but the nature of the data collected and the way in which it is presented (the clear connection between event and price change and other things) makes it quite useful for planning investment strategy for a given company.
As with any such site, more research would have to be done for a given long term investment, but this does make a great starting place for that research. That is the great benefit to being the aggregator rather than the source. They pull together a lot of data from some other great sources and put it together in a way that makes the whole better, in some ways, than the sum of the parts. (C.f., Google News for another example)
At risk of sounding like a GOOG fanboy, they've batted another home run. We get a solid resource for long term investment, and they get access to our portfolios. Everyone wins (excepting the privacy concerns that are a legitimate tangent to nearly every google story).
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Am I the only one who thinks that Google's true innovation has slipped? Most of the new stuff Google is rolling out is already being done by someone else (you can argue until you're blue in the face as to whether or not they are doing it better than everyone else). Their search engine was revolutionary, but this seems too evolutionary for the kind of talent they have. Come on Google, blow us away like you used to.
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
There will be no "Alphas" because the machines will take their place. All humans will be subject to perfect machine law and machine rule. Don't worry though because in essence, we will be their pets and will be well taken care of.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
before I RTFA'd I thought it might be a currency version of the G drive - just upload all your money to Google for safe keeping, where they will index all the serial numbers, and you can get to download it whenever you need it. And when the government come to ask for it, they will refuse as much as possible!
http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=13756934
They're there affecting their effect.
void Main()
{
do{
Evil();
}while(true)
};
gives a compiler error at Google.
Try this: look at some stocks, and then check the main page
It added the recently viewed quotes to your main page and started to aggregate articles based on those stocks. Pretty nifty.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure I'd trust financial information from a site called "fool.com" of all things.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
please see your administrator
is all it says for me here at work (f500 large corp)
have my current portfolio data on my google homepage like gmail? Then I can check my email, stocks, newsheadlines, etc, when I open my internet browser.
Look out Yahoo! Your Alexa rating is about to be taken over by the Google Monster.
Kevin Dill
http://ushightech.com/
Google is now becoming more like yahoo.. which brings up the question... Why switch when yahoo does many things like these better? Have the tables turned? where the "innovation?, i just see some pretty graphs, and not even the same amount of info.
PS: Yes, i do work for Yahoo, but not related to this product, so my opinions are just that, my opinions.
I look at this kind of like I do Google News, which you can route to your Google homepage. It's a mock up. A first run. I don't expect it to be perfect. I tried google news for a while, and found the stories there weren't as interesting as what was feeding through CNN and slashdot. I turned it off. But given some time, maybe they will turn it around. I'm sure they didn't start out the top search engine either, but experience and persistence work wonders.
//end rant
The only thing from Google I didn't like was their toolbar - and I specifically didn't like it because I found it was autopackaged into certain softwares as an opt out instead of an opt in. Meaning the default option was to install the toolbar, and the user had to take special measures not to install a potentially browser wrecking software.
I prefer my software like a salad bar - where I get to choose what goes on the plate, rather than someone else deciding a piece of lemon would make the dish look better.
But I digress. Grats to Google for entering a new market, I look forward to seeing what innovations they might bring!
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
The site barely has anything on it and Slashdotters are praising it simply because it has the Google name. Do me a favor, go look at Yahoo Finance, with its stock screeners, advanced portfolio, coverage of various markets - including bonds, ETFs and Mutual Funds. Then tell me if this isn't just another case of dorks drooling over the latest Google offering.
Announcing Google Crap!
crap.google.com!
Seems like they could have polished it a little more before release.
Is a page full of RSS feeds gonna become Industry standard?
I think a company like Google could put together a little more funding for web development, especially in this world of rich Internet Apps.
Get on the cutting edge Google!
So now you can see it's value declining with even more ease.
I would have to say I love it. Great interface and another great technology by Google.
Man, their picking fights with MSN and now YAHOO! Whos next?
Bryan
looks like a good start, but it's too simplistic even for a beta.
So I looked at this initially with the same elitism and disdain of any slashdotter...but take a look at this link of google: http://www.google.com/finance?q=google&btnG=Search &hl=en
Ignore the stupid sliders, and maybe yahoo already did all this but...
- Flags on signifigant news and where it fell on the stock's timeline, COOL
- Blog posts about the company, ties into the current buzz, COOL
- Hooks into google groups to see discussions going on about said company, COOL
Simply a great way to see where a company is both financially, and in the net community's eyes. Simple, but neat.
Oh, and check out Viacom: http://www.google.com/finance?cid=703770
The blog posts about tom cruise and south park? see, that is damn cool.
-mix
... google has rolled out a finance site.
If they ever release sex.google.com, I won't need any other sites!
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
I love gmail greatly, and would gladly pay for it. If the stability of the thing were improved. Right now, I'm in the really bad situation of depending on Gmail for non-trivial things, and if this lasts much longer, I might have to switch to some other service.
On the topic of *this* thread...the big problem with finance.google.com is indeed the lack of acquisition data for holdings in your portfolio. You really want and need that, especially come tax time if you need to claim cap gains and losses.
Babar
As usual, this Google service is very US-centric. Too bad lots of US investors also invest overseas.
I tried to import my portfolio from Yahoo! finance - "We will support international symbols shortly"
Well, considering that I have been waiting for my Google Homepage to support them for about 8 months now, I wonder how long "shortly" will be.
Simmilar problems exist trying to add weather on the Google homepage, even if you know the international airport code for the area, it will get you nowhere. Works fine on My Yahoo!.
I want a service that can handle and tabulate my finances online. That way, the IRS can just subpoena google every mid-april, and I don't have to file my taxes that year! Google can do it for me!
Informatus Technologicus
I was surprised to see info about the consulting firm that I work for, which is privately held (http://finance.google.com/finance?q=collaborative +consulting), including pictures of our officers.
Perry
Had the opportunity to use it today and was impressed. Nice and simple, gives good information but I wouldn't have expected less. I like the nice touch with the Blogs. Good little feature.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Let's be honest, did you even look at it before making that comment?
or else!
this was the fourth headline on the page when i looked....
always mosh clockwise
Damn fine work on Google's part. This is the best interface for stock information I have seen on the entire internet. Everything you need in terms of details are all together and simply laid out with a sweet AJAX news/price chart. Bravo Google. Bravo.
Could the data you get from finance.google.com be accessed in a reasonable manner using their API?
hey, that's the google "sleek modernist" web interface, not a quick hack.
probably because you have a syntax error on the last line, no ';' needed at the end of your scope.
What is slashdot?
Overall I think it looks good. One thing I really like about the chart is that as you change the date it updates the news articles to that time period, which is great if you're just looking at a new stock and want to see what that 30% dip 10 months ago was about. On the downside, the little boxes linking to the news stories are nice, but overall annoying, there should be a way to turn them off. Having them on the chart makes it much harder to read technically. Charting should also have at least basic technical analysis tools like Yahoo! Finance where you can get moving averages, volatility metrics, etc. Plus, you've got to have the ability to view the chart on a logarithmic scale. Its a nice start, but its not enough to get me to start using it instead of Yahoo! Finance. If they enrich the charting capabilities, then we might be in business.
Has anyone figured out if it's possible to do a log scale plot? How about comparing two tickers on the same chart?
Early reviews are in for Google Finance
March 21, 2006 12:32:05 (ET)
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Thumbs-down for Google Finance.
That's what some hedge-fund managers -- the investment pros most likely to short Google -- told me after checking out the latest service launched by the most popular search engine in the world.
And, to some extent, I agree with them.
Launched Tuesday, Google's (GOOG, Trade) latest, Google Finance -- with its perfunctory quotes, news headlines, charts and the like -- is not terribly impressive, partly because it looks so much like other finance sites created years ago, notably Yahoo Finance.
'This was one of our most requested features by our users last year.'
Sonya Boralv, Google
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, actually, given that Katie Stanton, a former Yahoo (YHOO, Trade) employee, is running Google's new vertical.
To be fair, there are some interesting features, like a very cool chart and news mash-up. In it, Google has taken its charts and news and integrated them so that readers can see where the stock was trading as particular news hit. People do this all the time -- look at news, and the time it hit, and then go to a chart and pinpoint the time. But it's eliminating the interim steps that makes Google stock charts instantly appealing.
But besides an interactive chart, there is nothing innovative or certainly spectacular about the new service. Where are the real-time, live quotes? Where's the related video? Where are the open application programming interfaces, or APIs, so that techies can add maps and other neat tools that Google hasn't thought of?
Google doesn't have open APIs at present, but it's something the search engine "might look at doing in the future," said Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv, in an e-mail.
To be sure, Google doesn't need bells and whistles to be good. It just needs to be relevant. And, that is, of course, yet to be seen.
As I understand it, Google will put more weight on what it deems "authoritative" news sources. One has to ask, however, what Google will deem "authoritative."
In keeping with Google's search and news-aggregation business model, the site directs Web users to the sites of its partners to view content and serves up no display ads on Google's own pages. So Google won't be getting the ad revenue.
Google may not even require its financial-news partners to pay the search monster for traffic. Among the financial sites Google directs traffic to are CNet, Forbes.com, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of this column.
So why is Google doing this, pitting itself against its news partners? For starters, if you haven't noticed, Google's moved well beyond its search-engine roots. Despite its dominant position in the search business, Google's services are threatening to more than its search rivals, Yahoo (YHOO, Trade) and Microsoft's (MSFT, Trade) MSN.
Google competes with the portals and Internet service providers for e-mail customers via Gmail. Google's Froogle and GBase services compete with eBay (EBAY, Trade) and others. Its video store competes with Apple's (AAPL, Trade). Google Talk might one day compete with cable companies, like Comcast.
It's also likely that Google is entering the vertical market because it's noticing that a substantial number of users go to Google News and type in "goog" or "aapl" -- or other letter combinations, or full names of publicly held companies -- which it reads as requests for stock data and the latest related news from some 4,500 sources.
"We can't provide any details on the number of searches for stock quotes but can tell you that we have had a lot of user demand for more in-depth financial information. This was one of our most requested features by our users last year," said Boralv.
Moreover, traffic to finance sites has grown faster than traffic to Internet sites overall. Traffic to financial-news and information sites grew 10% in February, according to N
Further, they say that they are getting the data direct in their blog.
Also, look again at the blog: Canadian Venture Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange.
When I first read the title I was thinking this was going to be a personal finance management app of sorts. Would be pretty cool. Although I wouldn't exactly want that information to be saved on Google servers.
http://www.hollowdepth.com
One thing about Google is that they (sometimes) open up their APIs. For Free Software financial apps, it would be really great to have a free stock quotes feed that was realtime.
It might not be a quick hack, but it definitely didn't go through a proper usability testing and evaluation.
The fact that it does a cool zoom effect when you click somewhere does not excuse the absence of 'insider transactions' link on the stock page. And neither does it justify the presence of company address, summary and management list. Leave alone some useless blog links. The view is overcrowded with information that is not needed on a day-to-day basis. And it rather feels more like a 'miscellaneous information' page than a concise summary.
And in this light, finance.google.com is almost an exact opposite of google.com, which is indeed an "everything you need, nothing you don't" deal.
Unless Google will allow customizing stock views, I don't see how this thing can take off the ground at all. Sure it looks nice, but it is barely usable. Though of course it is very subjective take on things.
PS. Yahoo Finance got it nearly perfect. No pretty graphs, which I'm sure they will add shortly and which are not critical to have anyway.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
And of course, this will be in beta for the next 50 years, as every other google service is :).
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
As history has proven, something by google cannot, by definition, be "something quickly hacked together". I agree with most posters in that the pages are better organised than google.
I am now expecting google to give us even more. What more? An example is some basic analysis that a Stony Brook university project I worked on provides: www.textbiz.org.
It's time to put down the pipe.
Check this out, type "nanotechnology" in the finance search box or click.
You get a list of 60 nanotechnology related companies. I'm assuming it searches by profile or industry. With a more advanced search language, you could pull up very selective lists of stocks. The hard part to trading is finding a stock in the sector that you like and then comparing it with a few competitors. Google could add some tags so you could do:
nanotechnology industry:medical peratio:+10.1 eps:>.01
and get a list of stocks in the medical industry who've mentioned nanotechnology and have a PE ratio of +10.1 and an EPS of greater than 1 cent.
That would be tight.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Call me slow.. it took me a day to notice that their stock charts are scrollable and seem to be implemented on AJAX (like google maps). I was slow to notice becuase of how dramatically this exceeded my expectations.
So assuming that google can get their news feeds up to snuff, then this interactive stock chart will beat yahoo finance the same way that google maps beat mapquest/mapblast. It is way less irritating to use.