Google Finance Beta
For the eight people who read this blog who haven't already noticed it, Google released their beta version of a finance portal this morning (here's the Click Commerce page). David Jackson at the Internet Stock Blog did a great job of summarizing the features and the sources for Google's data, you can find his writeup here.
Although Yahoo is likely to incorporate some of these features shortly especially the interactive charting with key news release dates noted on the chart, I'm very pleased about the amount of data Google has been able to cram on one page. While there isn't anything here that you couldn't also find elsewhere, they've done a relatively elegant job of combining a lot of the critical things you might look for in a thumbnail sketch of a company -- basic company financials and operating ratios, key personnel, company profile, etc. Yahoo makes you click to several different pages to get an overview of a lot of these items, and while you'd need to dig deeper than this into any company before buying shares it is nice to see a fuller thumbnail available here.
And of course, Google has incorporated blog searching in this, which I hope will be a valuable service as the number of excellent financial bloggers grows, and they're using their own Google groups instead of the much more widely used Yahoo Finance Message Boards. The Yahoo Boards are almost entirely intolerable (and intolerant), so hopefully Google can grow their Groups into a genuine competitor -- I'm willing to give them a try.
Finally, one nice tidbit -- I like that Google has included both PE and forward PE on the brief snapshot at the top, that should help to minimize confusion and let us compare apples to AAPLs.
Although Yahoo is likely to incorporate some of these features shortly especially the interactive charting with key news release dates noted on the chart, I'm very pleased about the amount of data Google has been able to cram on one page. While there isn't anything here that you couldn't also find elsewhere, they've done a relatively elegant job of combining a lot of the critical things you might look for in a thumbnail sketch of a company -- basic company financials and operating ratios, key personnel, company profile, etc. Yahoo makes you click to several different pages to get an overview of a lot of these items, and while you'd need to dig deeper than this into any company before buying shares it is nice to see a fuller thumbnail available here.
And of course, Google has incorporated blog searching in this, which I hope will be a valuable service as the number of excellent financial bloggers grows, and they're using their own Google groups instead of the much more widely used Yahoo Finance Message Boards. The Yahoo Boards are almost entirely intolerable (and intolerant), so hopefully Google can grow their Groups into a genuine competitor -- I'm willing to give them a try.
Finally, one nice tidbit -- I like that Google has included both PE and forward PE on the brief snapshot at the top, that should help to minimize confusion and let us compare apples to AAPLs.
Labels: GOOG
This article posted by One Guy @ 3/21/2006 08:34:00 PM 0 comments
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