The category-killing brilliance of the Google search engine was nowhere to be found yesterday when the new Google Finance website hit the Internet.
Google Finance is not a redefinition of on-line financial information in the same way Google.com turned other Internet search engines into dead technology.
Think of it instead as a clever and useful alternative to giants such as Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and Canada's own Globeinvestor.com.
Like the Google search engine, you have to use Google Finance (finance.google.com) to appreciate it. To merely look at this freebie website is to be underwhelmed in the extreme as a result of a dearth of graphics or colour. Yahoo Finance has become one of the most popular financial websites with a similarly plain face, so this is obviously not a handicap.
Google Finance starts to show its stuff when you go beyond the obligatory business headlines on the homepage and go after a stock quote. Google has employed a system that Globeinvestor.com recently adopted, where you can type in either a stock symbol or name of a company you want to research. Translation: The days of fumbling around to find the right stock symbol are over. Google's search-engine expertise means you can even type in a vague term like "cars" and get a list of stocks in the auto sector.
Google has also capitalized on its news-gathering capabilities, which aggregate stories from about 4,500 sources. If you checked up on what's been written about EnCana Corp. lately, you'd find items from the Bloomberg business news service, CBC.ca, various Canadian and U.S. newspapers and a few investing websites. Yahoo Finance offers the same service, but Google seems to have the more diverse selection of news stories.
You can also use Google Finance to track mentions of a stock by bloggers. Your take on how useful this feature is will depend on whether you have the time and patience to wade through all the drivel out there in blogdom.
One of the most novel features on the Google Finance site is that recent news items are integrated into stock charts in a way that helps explain day-to-day price movements. Another neat touch is that you can run your cursor along the line of a stock chart and see what the closing price and volume was on any given trading day.
One more cool feature: Pass your cursor over the names of company executives and you'll often get a thumbnail picture along with the person's age and start date in the job. There also links in some cases to executive biographies and details on compensation.
As any Canadian user of U.S. investing websites knows, there's always a trick to extracting quotes for TSX-listed stocks. On Google Finance, you have to type TSE: in front of a stock, as in TSE:TD or TSE:COS.UN.
While there is Canadian data on the site, it's decidedly second-rate in quantity. For example, you get links to analysts' estimates on other websites for U.S. stocks, as well as to regulatory filings and listings of major shareholders. Canadian stocks listed on U.S. exchanges may get the same deluxe treatment, but stocks that trade only on the Toronto Stock Exchange do not.
If you're interested in Canadian stocks, then, you'll find that Google Finance augments but doesn't replace a site like Globeinvestor.com. Similarly, users of Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com) and MSN Money (moneycentral.msn.com and finance.sympatico.msn.ca) won't want to abandon those sites for Google Finance.
Yahoo offers more content to browse through, and it's an ideal place to set up a whole bunch of portfolios to track stocks you own or want to follow. You can only set up one portfolio tracker on Google Finance and, for now, you can't enter Canadian stock symbols.
MSN Money offers a package of investing tools that are more slick and user-friendly than other competitors in the realm of no-fee investing websites. You might visit this site when you're looking for ideas about what to invest in. Google Finance, by comparison, is where you go when you think you know what you want, but want to do some further investigation.
Google Finance won't dominate no-cost investing websites as Google.com rules other Internet search engines, but that doesn't make it an automatic disappointment. For one thing, this new site offers some incremental improvements over other sites that users are bound to appreciate. For another, Google has added some high-powered competition to a sector that hasn't seen anything really exciting happen since the technology bubble burst back in 2000.
Best of all, the current edition of Google Finance is an early "beta" version that promises future refinements. For on-line investors, things are really looking up.
Google Finance goes on-line
The people behind the wildly popular Google.com Internet search engine launched an investing website yesterday that competes with giants such as Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. Here are some top features on the Google Finance site:
Stock charts linked to news stories: Allows you see how a stock's ups and downs have been influences by corporate announcement and coverage by the financial media.
News and blogs: Google sifts through thousands of news sources and blogs to find references to individual stocks.
Easy stock quotes: Just enter a company's stock symbol, its name or its sector.
