Google Finance Live In Beta

[shor]

When researching a stock, you want as much relevant information as possible and who better for relevance than Google? Google wades directly into a battle for a piece of a potentially lucrative 161 million user pie. That's right, according to ComScore, there were 161 million visitors to financial sites in January 06 alone.

Google Finance taps into:

• Google News for mainstream information
• Google Blog Search for relevant critiques and opinions
• Google Groups for moderated discussion on companies

Yet another Google property that has literally zero in-house content, their penchant for mash-up shows wih flash charts that allow users to zoom and expand on-the-fly while overlaying news events against stock performance (a long overdue feature). Minor details like pulling pictures of a company's management through Google Image Search are icing on the cake.

Danny talks more about Google Finance here: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3592876

My blog post is Here .

Google Finance
Those who know me know that I have been a particularly strong advocate of Google starting their own Finance page. Well, starting today, they finally have released Google Finance. Personally, I think that GMoney would have been a better name, but that is their call.

One of my best friends works at Google, and I sent him the following e-mail outlining my thoughts on the product:

1) There is no link to portfolio from the front page. The portfolio is "hidden" 2-3 clicks deep. This is a bad design feature. The portfolio, on the other hand, is very elegant and easy to use.

2) The area to click on the letter on the flash charts is too small. You must click directly on the letter, when it is intuitive to click anywhere on the box. I repeatedly "miss" on my clicks and I am a pretty experienced computer user ;-) Please ask them to expand the area to click on the box.

3) There is no logic after you click on a news event that is outside of the "shown" news items. It nicely scrolls down so that the event you clicked on is 2nd to last in the news items. Why did the coders decide 2nd to last? Why not the middle? Or why not keep it at the end?

4) I really do not like how when the user moves to a 6 month view, and scrolls back a year or two, the user does not return to today when click on "1D." This should automatically take you to the current day.

5) The date range on the charts is NOT prominent enough.

6) Before the market opens, I really don't want to see a bunch of "N/A"'s. Show me something meaningful or yesterday's or take it out.

7) You mentioned that a grandma should be able to use and understand everything. Why aren't there links to describe what "BETA," "P/E," or "MKT CAP" are? Where do those numbers come from?

8) Under the management section, I honestly cannot believe how much screen real estate GFinance is wasting on the FULL title of the management's team. 85-90% of people only look at management to see how much they get paid. Yahoo! has it right in the front. That is truly the only thing people care about management. At least put it on the popup box.

9) Finance people are going to hate the inability to download the financial information to CSV or XLS.

10) Finance people are going to be confused with seeing Total Revenue and Gross Profit WITHOUT COGS.

** MAJOR BUG ** 11) For GOOG, the cash flow statements are backwards. On all the other financial pages, you show the quarterly info first, but for SCF, you show annual information the first. In addition, for the company financial box, the WRONG NUMBERS are appearing under quarterly. It is displaying the same numbers for quarterly and annual. I double-checked this for CRAI, and the problem is worse. The SAME NUMBERS are being shown for balance sheet and SCF under quarterly and annual. This needs to be fixed immediately! This can cause major problems for people.

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Bottom line: I see no advantage to using this product over yahoo finance. I see many disadvantages. No export for stock prices or balance sheet info.

GFinance should have been AT LEAST as good as Y! finance plus more functinoality and easier to use. Allow exporting multiple company's balance sheet or stock info. Have links describing what numbers mean. Have links straight from financials to SEC statements. Integrate analyst estimates into a new section. Allow easy ways to compare company financials.

This falls far short of what it could have been. I think it will be ridiculed in the press. Let's wait and see for the rest of the day.

[shor]

Originally Posted by nitinjulka

This falls far short of what it could have been. I think it will be ridiculed in the press. Let's wait and see for the rest of the day.

There's a reason (well several) why everything in Google stays in public-release Beta flavour for years I think its a pretty good start, especially when you can immediately see the product differentiation compared to Y!Finance and the other players. Most of the press I've read specifically relates to the 'Beta' phase:

The finance site is "an early beta-stage product," Google emphasized.

The Image Search has been a source of mirth for our financial analysts. I like how iinet's (big ISP in Australia) Managing Director, Michael Malone is secretly an NBA player (scroll down to Management --> Michael Malone)

[shor]

Jeremy's recent post 'Why Google Finance Makes Me Sad' is essential reading. If nothing else, he hopes that the entry of Google Finance will reinvigorate the competition.

It makes me sad because I end up thinking about how Yahoo! Finance has stagnated for a long time. It never really recovered from the pain of the dotcom crash. So many of my old Finance coworkers have either left the company or moved on to other groups (several moved into Search last year). Heck, I encouraged many of them to get out!

There was a lack of leadership and, even more importantly, a serious LACK OF VISION. It really disappointed me.

One has to admire his passion for all things Yahoo - his unflinching perspective is fantastic PR for Y! whether they agree with his opinion or not

We also learn that one of the Google Finance leaders was previously a part of the Y! Finance team and that many of the Google innovations were raised by Y! Finance members years ago but never implemented.