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29-03-2006
Google Launches Financial Information
Service
(Page
1 of 2 )
Unless you actually make it your
business to do so, it's very
tricky to keep up with all of Google's new services. With the
search engine giant's track
record for shaking up the industry with each new "beta," you know
whatever comes out of Google Labs is sure to be worth a look. Today,
we're going to look at Google Finance.
This service provides financial news, stock quotes, charts, and other
data to its users. It has a
number of novel features, such as the ability to look at financial
news along side historical price charts over various time frames. News
results change with the dates. It could be a very handy way to connect
the price of a company's stock with what was happening to the company
at that time.
This offering didn't come out of nowhere. Finance
websites have proven to be
immensely popular with
web surfers. ComScore Media
Metrix reported that such sites attracted 161 million visitors in
January. That represents an increase of nearly a quarter over the
previous year. Venerable search engine Yahoo! runs one of the most
popular ones; its 10-year-old finance site boasted 34.3 million
visitors in January, handily beating
Microsoft's MSN Money by more
than 10 million visitors.
Yahoo! has said that it isn't worried about Google's new finance
offering. It won't even discuss what effect the new site will have on
the field. In an interview, Yahoo! Finance General Manager Peggy White
said that "Rather than concentrate on any one given competitor, we
really look at creating superior products and a superior customer
experience."
So
should Yahoo! and MSN be worried? Well, Google Finance doesn't carry
advertisements yet, but it will no doubt be only a matter of time.
While Yahoo! is not as advertising-dependent as Google, such a move is
likely to cut into Yahoo!'s business. In the interests of those who
might want to use the service (for keeping track of their finances, or
advertising with, or both), I thought it might be interesting to poke
around Google Finance and see what it has to offer.
The
first thing you see when you visit the Google Finance Beta is a Market
Summary showing results for Nasdaq, Dow, S&P 500, and the NYSE. Right
below that you see today's headlines. Google is pulling from Google
News with an
algorithm that identifies
financial stories and grabs them from around 4,500 different sources.
Yahoo!, in contrast, relies on about 40 top editorial sources for its
financial news.
So
I figured I'd try it out by putting IBM into the
search box. I got a page that
showed me the stock's high, the low, the volume, the 52-week high,
52-week low, and average volume. Below this was a chart of the stock's
performance over the last three
business days. There were letters
on the chart that corresponded to linked headlines on the right. It
seemed as if Google thought there was some relation between the
stories and the stock price (though it wasn't obvious, at least to me,
why IBM throwing new
collaboration tools at the
mid-market should somehow relate to a dip in IBM's stock).
The
chart is scrollable. When you scroll backward, you can also zoom in by
using links to show one-day, five-day, one-month, three-month,
six-month, and one-year views. After you click on the link to zoom in,
more little letters in boxes appear on the chart, which correspond to
more linked news headlines on the right. It's a very cool feature if
you're interested in getting a historical view.
Scrolling down the two-column page, I saw a box with Company Facts,
such as 2005 revenue and number of employees, and links to the IBM
site that could give you other details about the company (news
releases, history,
executives, employment
opportunities, and more). To the right of this was a box that included
a company summary, with a link you could click for more
information--which would be provided not by IBM in this case, but
Reuters. Scrolling down some more, I saw more detailed company
financials on the left, and a box detailing management on the right.
Google gets points for coolness here: hold your cursor over one of the
names, and you get a thumbnail photo of the executive (when
available), when they became an officer, how old they are, and links
to their bio and compensation (provided via Reuters) and their trading
activity (provided, ironically enough, through Yahoo Finance!).
Get
to the bottom of the page, and you see a section that details related
companies, places you can go for more resources, and, over on the
right, a section for blog posts. That's another first for Google:
providing blog posts covering financial news alongside financial news
information written by journalists. As Google puts it in the FAQ, "If
you want the opinions of citizen journalists, you got'em; Google
Finance includes company-related postings from Google Blog Search."
The
three that came up talked about IBM's researchers using nanotubes as
transistors in integrated circuits; IBM sponsoring NCAA basketball and
the possible fallout from that; and Lenovo's new laptop moving away
from its IBM heritage. There was a link at the bottom to more blogs
covering IBM-related subjects. Indeed, in general, the page contained
all the links to sources for just about all the information you could
ever hope to see.
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