Google Launches Financial Information Service - Checking out Google Finance
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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.
Next: Going Beyond the First Page >>
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