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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.
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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.
"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!
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.
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.
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
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.
Other products in the same class (free stock reports, essentially, right?) also have 15 or 20 minute delays, it's not a specific disadvantage to Google Finance.
Google Finance stock delays
Yahoo Finance stock delays
MSN Money stock delays
Besides that, Google News left beta in January... doesn't seem they've stopped developing that, at the very least.
You mean like this or this? The former connects to Microsoft Money. I tried both and now use Total Look...obviously I'm not a tin-foil hat type.