Google Launches Beta Finance Site
By Geoff Duncan
March 21, 2006
Now Google's playing the market: check out Google Finance, a new beta service which combined financial news, stock quotes, and targeted searches.
Internet heavyweight Google has decided to enter the arena of financial and investment information services, today launches a public beta of Google Finance. Although as yet less comprehensive than competing financial information services offered by rivals like Microsoft. AOL, yahoo, and TheStreet.com, Google clearly hopes to gain and edge by combining services and information in new ways, while adding just a splash of that special Google technological and branding mojo.
Google Finance purports to offer a broad range of information about North American stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, combined with charts, market data, and news. Google Finance offers the usual spate of symbol lookups and price charts, but puts some interesting spins on them. For instance, interactive charts bring together dated market data with news stories so relationships between news and stock prices are more apparent: as you zoom through time, the displayed news stories change with the date. Google Finance also integrates with Google News to cluster stories by topic, date range, and computed importance—news sources include Reuters, Hoover's, Morningstar, IDC, and Revere Data
Google Finances' search capabilities also extend into Google's Blog Search, so if you want unsolicited opinions, scuttlebutt, ranting, and the occasionally maybe-insightful gem from the blogosphere, Google's going to try to plug you into it. Google Finance will be the first major Internet finance service to offer blogs right alongside traditional news outlets. Google Finance also offers executive pictures (how cute!), unmoderated online discussion groups, and portfolio management tools.
Right now, Google Finance does not include advertisements, but Google says it plans to eventually introduce advertising into the service. Google Finance started off as a side project of Google engineers in Bangalore, India; Google says it's investigating creating versions of Google Finance for other countries.