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Google Finance

Google finance launched last night. I was expecting them to launch google finance for a while, so i wasn’t totally surprised when katie stanton - google finance product manager - pinged me after the launch on messenger.

The front page looks like a simplified version of yahoo! finance. There are no currency links, mortgage rates, links to deeper parts of site (actives, indices, bonds, etfs, options etc). So the home page emphasizes huge search box, top indices summary, Major market news, Most recently looked up stocks and related news. There’s tons of other “crud” on yahoo! finance page, most notably ads (big expand on mouseover ads) and ads pretending as content (For example banking center, credit card center etc) that google did away with that’s very good.

The quotes page itself, again has no ads, has quite a bit of content presented very well. Despite having a lot of content, the page looks organized and here are some early thoughts

  • quotes page doesn’t require me to jump off the page for almost anything.
  • One place to find current price of the stock, supersized and in the area where the eye focuses first (upper left of the page)
  • Huge, interactive chart. This, in my opinion, is where g-finance page is much much better than y! finance page. It’s big, covers the entire timeline, doesn’t need to reload for every click. Play with it, you’ll know.
  • News section ranked by relevance and time indicated on the chart. I love this ranking by relevance. I understand the value of timeliness of info in the financial world, but, y! finance news article listing is a joke. I frequently find companies/articles that are ticker spam ranked as the TOP article. Ticker spam is news article about a company that has no/little relevance to tickers being mentioned in the article. For example, article is about agricultural company growing tomatoes and at the bottom they mention that this company has a website just like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (Goog). Now all of a sudden when i look up info about YHOO, this totally irrelavant news article is the top choice. This isn’t small companies doing ticker spam, it’s folks like motley fool etc. One thing i wish they had was to allow users to rank articles by time if they chose to.
  • News article indicated on chart. Easy way to see which article if any affected the stock price.
  • Blogs incorporated. This is a move i love! This is awesome, financial blogging has been on the rise and it’s an acknowledgement from google about that. Check out Phat Investor
    , if you wondered who blogs about stocks.
  • Google groups, moderated groups are also linked to this page
  • Related tickers! I wonder how they determine related tickers, but it’s great to have related stocks on this page.
  • They put company summary, some facts, and financials on the page. It’s good info to have, but i’d prefer it be ajax’d out not to show everytime. This information does not change very often and is of limited persistent value

    • Overall a great quotes page. But the best thing about their site is not this page. The feature i love best about google finance is search. You can type in company name, sector, ticker symbol, still get great results. Y! finance ticker symbol look up is pretty bad and they have just chosen not to solve that problem. (Note: I was part of the team that implemented this solution on y! finance - more on that at the end of this post). You can type in random strings and still get decent strings. I tried, “games”, “bonds”, “actives”, “movies”, “wireless”, “wireless chips”, “studios”. Most results are satisfactory. Strange things to note - i got a quote RDY when i asked for actives & I got SIFY in the results back when i typed “movies”. Overall pretty good.

    There are quite a few nit picks, including no RSS feeds for news, limited portfolios etc, but overall it’s a really good first effort from Google.

    Now for some background. I was part of the Y! Finance engineering team from late 1996 through 2000. I was/am very proud of the product we built there. We built the best finance site on the web. A lot of content that was inaccessible and/or expensive before y! finance was free to use and easy to understand because of our product. Even now, overall Y! finance is a very good site.

    However, for a while now, i felt that y! finance stopped innovating, they stopped trying to solve hard problems. Message boards/groups was an acknowledged problem, there’s quite a few other discussions that happen in the finance team. I hope the good folks in finance who want to build better and more innovative products gain strength from the launch of Google Finance. I really hope that there will be renewed focus from yahoo on finance properties. I wish all the Y! Finance folks the very best in beating google, because google finance is indeed a really good product and worthy competitor.

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 9:58 am and is filed under Technology & Product. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    2 Responses to “Google Finance”

    1. Derek Says:
      March 21st, 2006 at 4:16 pm

      Just a heads-up, the individual you name as having told you about GFinance may not have been “supposed/allowed” to tell you in advance. It might be worth redacting her name, lest you accidentally get her in trouble. :-)

    2. James Says:
      October 5th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

      I was having a hard time trying to explain the Y!Finance “Symbol Lookup” failed to do a decent job to search for a ticker. I used “Hanes” as an example, actually the full company name is “Hanesbrands Inc.” and the ticker is “HBI”

      You CAN NOT find it by using:

      1. “hane”
      2. “hanes”
      3. “hanesbrand”

      You HAVE to typed “hanesbrands” to find it. I know exactly what’s the problem is - The programmer added an extra space in front of the “*” or “%” in the SQL code so the search condition becomes

      SELECT Ticker, CompanyName
      FROM tblSymbol
      WHERE CompanyName LIKE “hane %”

      They should just remove the space so it becomes
      …
      WHERE CompanyName LIKE “hane%”

      But when I told them in email, they said:
      ……
      We were not able to replicate the following issue you reported. It may have been caused by our system, by your web browser, or perhaps your Internet connection.

      What the…

      And another email said
      ……
      Please be aware that you are using the ticker symbol search incorrectly, the search box as seen on the front of all Yahoo! Finance pages is the ticker symbol search box, it is for ticker symbols only, not company names or abbreviations, ticker symbols only.
      ……

      But the “Symbol Lookup” page said

      “To get a quote, enter a company name or stock symbol in the quote box above.”

      The support personal is so dumb that he can’t even understand where is the problem. By judging the reply comes in at “PST 1:45am” that might give u some clues where they are.

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