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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.
"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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
That's probably because Google thinks its own index knows more about companies than folks like Hoovers do. Most search results for "wipro vivek paul" suggest that Paul is still with the company.
Google's search engine falls short in other ways, too. They think my employer is still at the same office it was at three years ago, for example, because all the copycat linkfarm sites they index say so.
For more information, click here.
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.
How am I supposed to pump and dump? bash and stash?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Google's in the business of making information easy to find/access. I would say this falls under that category.
unless, of course, you consider the real time quotes.
search for a ticker symbol. right above the chart, you'll see a line that starts "Real-Time ECN:" that is a real-time quote.
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
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.