Google Finance

I don’t know about you but I tend to use Google pretty much all the time as my search engine (though I am getting increasingly fond of the search field with different engines in Firefox). The interface remains the best in the business and this is exemplified in the new addition to their stable, Google Finance.

As they say in their blurb,

How is Google Finance different from existing financial websites?
Google Finance offers an easier way to search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies. Further, Google Finance also offers a broad range of company news and information in order to deliver more relevant, unbiased results in a clean, uncluttered user interface.

Here are some specific Google Finance features:

• Company Search — With Google Finance you can search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, using both company names and (where available) ticker symbols.
• Interactive Charts — Google Finance charts correlate market data with corresponding dated news stories to help you determine if there is a relationship between them (for instance, by seeing news stories that came out about a certain company in the context of what that company’s stock did that day). You can also click and drag the charts to see different time periods and zoom in to see more detailed information.
• News and More News — Google Finance incorporates our Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Stories are clustered by topic so you can see different opinions on a single subject; you can also review news stories by monthly date range and by importance (which is determined by algorithms).
• Blogs — If you want the opinions of citizen journalists, you got ‘em; Google Finance includes company-related postings from Google Blog Search.
• Company Management Team — Google Finance helps you put a face to a name. Mousing over an executive name shows you their picture as well as links, where available, to their biography, compensation details and trading activity.
• Discussion Groups — Talk amongst yourselves. Google Finance offers high-quality Discussion Groups whose dedicated team of moderators work to keep conversations on and spam-free.
• Portfolios — Google Finance offers a fast, easy and powerful way to keep create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.

That’s pretty comprehensive and allows a very broad range of types of information about a given company or area. For example, if you look up “reinsurance” you get a list of (at present) 378 companies, with the top 10 hits on the opening page. Drilling down to, say, Partner Re gives you a lot of information about the company, including not only ‘official’ news stories and press releases, but also – and this is really great – blog articles about the company. So you get not just the sanitised view, but also a more personal (and possibly more realistic) take.

One of the things I like, too, is the care that has gone into the little details. On that Partner Re page, go down to the Management section and mouse-over Patrick A Thiele. Cool, huh? That little bio link and the picture make it come alive a little more than the normal sort of site.

I’m impressed with this, especially as a roll-out project still in beta. Definitely one to bookmark and use.