Google News Roundup - Google Boosts Google Finance

Google has been competing with Yahoo ever since it was born, and not just as a search engine. While Google's search engine is clearly more popular than Yahoo's, Yahoo still boasts more popular services in certain areas. Take Yahoo! Finance, for example. According to a blogger writing for Ant & Sons, "Google Finance...has yet to pose a real threat to Yahoo Finance, the so-called behemoth of the online financial networks, as it currently offers a wealth of financial resources that Google still lacks, and an untouched following of thirty million unique visitors."

Apparently this concerns some people at Google, because the company has added a slew of new features to Google Finance. These include the following:

• A new home page designed to include more data in an easy to read format. The new page includes recent quotes, today's news, a more detailed market summary, market performance, and top movers modules.
  
• A new market summary module that includes performance information from the Dow, NASDAQ, S&P 500 and currency and exchange rate information.
  
• A sector summary that shows you at a glance how major sectors are performing in the U.S. financial market on that day. You can get more detailed information by scrolling over bar charts and/or clicking on the name of a particular sector.
  
• Enhanced Finance portfolios that include transactional support and functionality such as fields for purchase date, commission, and a notes section to help you keep better track of your investments.
  
• Personalized chart settings that allow you to choose default settings for your charts that fit your investment style, whether you're focused on the long term, the short term, or somewhere in between.

This is not a complete list of the changes and upgrades that Google has made to Google Finance. Combined with the fact that Google closed its Google Answers service, though, it sends a message of sorts. The company is beginning to realize it can't do everything - something rival search engine Yahoo seems to have found out only belatedly. On the other hand, Google is prepared to marshal its resources to fight the battles it thinks it can win.

But will it win this one? Does it need to? WebProNews had this to say: "Aesthetically, the improvements are a slam-dunk...Functionality is improved, but still lacks some important detail...With continued focus on providing the utmost of detail to the user, Google could eventually give Yahoo! a run for its money...But at least for now, Yahoo! still holds the advantage." This sounds very much like many other services Google has offered (Google Spreadsheets comes to mind) - they provide some very good functionality that many users want, but not quite enough for power users.

Google may not need to change this formula to continue to be successful, at least as long as its main product remains the market leader in its field. Perhaps Google isn't trying to win this particular battle so much as stay prominently in the game and make everybody nervous. That by itself may be worth doing, from Google's point of view. That's one theme that's likely to continue; you can probably count on Google keeping everyone on their toes for the next couple of years at least.