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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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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.
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.
It's not a bad way of doing things.
One thing Google learned from search is that people prefer simple. Provided an app does something useful, it's better in my view for it to start lacking some features than for it to drag useless, distracting, and poorly thought out features along for the rest of its natural lifespan. Let the users clamor for what they want, and cherry pick the low hanging fruit, repeating ad infinitum.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Google's in the business of making information easy to find/access. I would say this falls under that category.
The stock ticker is draggable, like Google Maps
Not quite like Google Maps; this stock chart is produced with Flash 8, not AJAX/DHTML/JS/whatever you want to call it.
Not a problem for me, or (I expect) for its target audience. Still, I think this is the first time Google has built something using Flash instead of AJAX, so it's notable just for that.
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.