As with any google announcement, the blogging world can’t stop talking about it. Google Finance is loaded eye candy but, as Om Malik notes, doesn’t change the game. Publishing 2.0 is even harsher in their post saying google should have launched with more advanced tools. My own 2 cents on a tool: My online brokerage has one really handy tool which lets you enter “what if i invested on these date” and shows the returns. Unfortunately, they do just about everything else wrong in terms of information and UI. Still, I think it’s good for google to get this site out now even if it’s lacking “new stuff”. Om Malik points out that Yahoo is probably making a killing on the mortage/broker ads that are on their defacto finance site. I think google’s v1 entry could easily take a cut of this pie. I know whenever I search for a stock price, I start at google.
On first view, I just assumed google implemented a kick-ass ajax graph only to be disapointed when I discovered it’s flash. Still, I think it’s really handy to be able to see a chart from specific date ranges and not just “6 months” or “1 year”. One cool feature is the overlay of news stories on the chart. For instance, if you search for RIM you can see how different legal decisions affected the stock. I wonder if there’s a public api such that you would write your own article, mention some dates, and link in a google chart with those dates overlaid (stuff like “when apple introduced the ipod” or “the 50 times Nortel restated earnings”).
One last interesting point is that the tearsheet includes moderated discussion and blog posts on the company. The blog content is a couple hours old so it might not be as useful to the overzealous daytrader, but does the job for me (this is probably because Google’s blog engine still doesn’t support ping updates. I still find the results better than technorati, which does accept pings). Battelle, who spoke to the Finance project manager right before the launch, points out that the moderated discussion is yet another step by google into the portal space.
Really, I don’t see a reason to bash this finance page. As I said, when looking for stock info I start at google and google finance is good enough to keep me on google real estate (and driving google ads). I think I could be described as a generic (mid-20s) casual investor, so this strikes me as a win for google.
I was initially impressed when I typed ‘cars’ in the search bar (as per the suggestion) and found that it listed major automobile manufacturers. I struggled to find a single other category search that works similarily and had no success. Although, to be honest I might have tried three times. Good stuff otherwise though. I see some excellent opportunities to extend the portfolio information to the deskbar, personalized page, mobile….everything? Or even drive web clips based on your vested interests.