(Just a quick note. I’ve been trying to get to bed by midnight each night.)
Here’s the thing. I don’t check our stock price that often. When I do, it’s mostly to assure myself that I can still afford plenty of cat food and/or cat toys to keep our cat in the style to which she has become accustomed. I’m not really a stock/finance kinda guy. Remind me to tell you my Cisco story some time.
But Google Finance just launched, and I notice that they nailed one thing that always bothers me. If you do a search for Lexmark, the search will show you an info page for Lexmark (stock symbol: LXK). If you didn’t want a company profile page, over in the top right is a “Find more results for lexmark” link so you can search for Lexmark Canada or whatever. At most finance pages, if you typed “Lexmark” into the search box, you’ll get a message like “That’s not a stock symbol! Click over here to search for a stock symbol.” You end up clicking 3-4 times, when the logical behavior is to give you the best matching stock profile, then give you the option to do a deeper search.
The draggable stock chart is nice, but I’m just happy to have a single search box that takes a pretty good guess about what company I’m interested in.
{ 42 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d have to agree – not knowing the stock symbol happens to me quite often and I then have to do some research in the search engines trying to figure it out.
This is definitly a very nice feature – however it does not work (yet) for companies listed on the LSE or other exchange.
Leo
Interesting that if you type say BT you get the ADR (Security Quoted in the USA ) type BT.A the code for the FTSE you get a diferent results for the Uk stock.
Pity it doesn’t display stats for both The ADR and the Real Stock
Yeah i noticed the different results for the uk stock.
Hey,
That is going to be a winner.
The graphs are done in flash, and really cool flash too. As an avid fan of this style, I think its fantastic to see Google using it.
As i see Google Finance is working.
But i i see many days Big Daddy operation is long term failed.
New algorithm and datacenters it is Like Pink Panter:)
But we must come back to main theme these post.
As i see You started as Big Coorporation so much new project.
Maybe it is nice but i recommended come back to Yours root.
B.R
Amen, Matt. I’ve always been frustrated by that. Why separate “search” from “symbol lookup”? That’s what most financial sites seem to have done.
When we implemented search in StockTickr, we return results from the whole site – stocks, tags, comments, and users. It seems silly to do it any other way.
Matt, you are so right. That endless clicking bothered me so often. But what is me annoying even more is that Google Finance is a product more that we will not see on Google.de for a long time. And we are already waiting for Google Local so long. Fortunately your competition in the german local search field has already started.
Yep, and if you really are off you also get a “did you mean”?
When I was at the GooglePlex I read something about Google being a dog company and that you could bring your dog to work. What do you think of that being a cat person ? =)
Matt,
It will need message boards or another way for investors to comment on stock to pull the audience away from Yahoo…there is a lot of garbage in those, but they are also useful since it is like having a bunch of analyst constantly looking for new info about the stock…also helps sometimes to gauge emotional state of investors…
Thanks for your help…
JO
I don’t know about stock exchange, but i like the design and the related information below the results. Today i did a search for “google” in it and got some useful information more than fincance
thanks to google finance
Nevermind…I see the discussion boards now… might be nice if we could click thru on Real Time ECN and see the buy and sell orders…
JO
wow, this is as nice as usefull – I like how it feels dragging & zooming around in the chart/timeline – very well done…
Wow! This is very impressive. I like the fact that you can easily scroll through time periods and see the points and related news articles. Good job once again!
The use of flash + ajax on that site is amazing! You can almost hover over / click on everything (like the CEOs, etc in the larger companies). Now if only they’d add some real geek number-crunching / chart analysis to the whole thing (I like clearstation.com for that, but it’s a different audience). It almost makes you want to take all your money and lose it in the next wave (again). Sigh. Good thing my wallet is firewalled.
So glad to hear that your cat is OK again!
I have been playing with it from the early morning and it seems very intuitive, at least more than YHOO. Another thing to stand out is the chart, it’s beautiful and really easy to track by time/date.
I hope Google’s Calendar also uses flash and ajax as well as in this site.
I love how the events are tagged on the chart and that they’re linked to the news stories associated with that event. The financials section is so much easier to read and better organized than other sites.
10080:BTG174, I know what you mean. I noticed that if you type IAC in, you don’t get Barry Diller’s set of companies. Turns out that IAC is a stock symbol that belongs to someone else, I think. But at least the search is smart enough to show you several search results instead of taking you to (IMHO) the wrong IAC. Can you imagine if Barry Diller announced something new on Ask, and the stock for IAC, a “manufacturer of painted tubular and steel sheet residential furniture,” jumped as a result? So there are searches that are difficult to tell what the user wanted, but at least 90% of the time Google gets you what you want quickly.
Shoemoney, cats have better things to do than to hang out at the Googleplex.
khanitha, we had two cats. I’m sad to say that Frank passed away around Thanksgiving (late November) of last year because of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP). His sister Emmy is doing really well though, and we keep her well-stocked in cat food and laser pointers
It does look pretty slick with the nice clean Google look on it. I like the news integrated into the price chart – definitely makes it easy to see.
Matt,
this is great, especially since it’s a beta. You might want to look at the “Blogs” postings–they seems to be Made for Adsense sites with a bazillion dashes and no original content. See http://www.google.com/finance?q=ARII for example.
also, it would be cool if more info was straight on Google’s site, similar to Y!, this people dont have to go to other sites…
Even better, you can type anything into the search box and it will search for companies related to your query.
Try a search for “RFID” and it will find companies that operate in the RFID industry.
Brandon
I have to agree with many of the posts here: interactive charting, “blog posts” alerts & the easier accessibility (which was one of Danny’s beefs, right?) are all great feedback. Personally, I love the cross-referencing of news & price fluctuations, but definitely the pics of the execs (so that I know at whom to scowl my “anti corporate-greediness” scowl.
That said:
[quote]Abhilash, I checked on one site that was in the supplemental situation and it had gotten ~240 regular pages back. It may take some of the sites a little while to be crawled again, but I’m trying to keep it foremost in the minds of the crawl folks.[/quote]
Thanks a ton for the update, Matt. Could there be any other way to fix the problem other than 1-by-1??
I did that search (i think) & got 240 pages as well, but could only get to about 150, of which 75 were actually supps. How can internal content pages be in the index while the homepage is not?
Our Homepage is nowhere to be found at all (neither in the main index or in the Supps). Previously at least the non-www version was in the Supps. People unfamiliar w/the situation believe that it’s a penalty–& understandably so (since our homepage doesn’t even show up–unlike most others).
How long is “a little while”, Matt? Please let us know, many others are watching closely (documented at WMW forum 30) and the truth is that my job could be at stake here.
Again, thanks so much in advance. Really.
I was wondering when you were going to debut in market analysis. I’m glad you guys over at Google have done. The standard has now raised a level. You guys in Google Labs, keep up the good work.
I am curious about what types of marketing opportunities Google Finance will open up for online marketers who are target investors? I was reading the Red Herring article and it mentioned “The financial area is also lucrative for web publishers, who can sell advertisements aimed at the investor class at higher rates than advertisers are willing to pay on, say, a general news site”. Does this mean that there will be a new category for adwords, similar to searching in the yahoo finance directory?
Good stuff… and dont have Adwords on, yet… how do they plan make any money out of this?
Here’s one I’d like to see you address. Is Google okay with design/optimization firms puttinng content on our own websites for ranking purposes. Sure easier than starting up a new domain.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2006-02%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=senior+settlements
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-02,GGLG:en&q=senior+life+settlements
I especially like the graph and how it overlays news items. The bios and company info are good too. The only problem with the search is that you cannot search for multiple tickers at the same time like you can in Yahoo. I think that is a big feature that was missed.
I would like to be able to type in:
yhoo goog siri
And get stock prices for all 3 at the same time. I know you can do it with the portfolio feature, but sometimes you just want to do a search:)
Thanks for the heads up Matt! The flash graph is very slick and intuitive! Certainly one of a kind! (and the alphabetic labels right on the graph that leads to news articles is a great combination too!)
RE: “Shoemoney, cats have better things to do than to hang out at the Googleplex”
oh, I wouldn’t saying killing native wildlife is “better’
Sorry Matt, But Just want to ask for your opinion about how many precentage of processing have you done on BigDaddy Datacenter?
Thanks for your answer in advance…
Good morning all
Rumor Has It… that Matt’s cat “Emmy” has eaten WMW Google News Forum 30 this morning at 8:10 pm (GMT+1) !
Emmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy.. please give us back Forum 30. C’mon girl spit it out..please
Correction to the exact time on which Emmy ate WMW Forum 30.
The correct time is this morning 8:10 am GMT+1… (and not 8:10 pm as I wrote in my previous comment).
Sorry..
Thanks Emmy for “releasing” WMW Forum 30 again after very loooooong 50 minutes.
Good girl
…now if you could just import portfolios instead of being forced to enter stocks one at a time…
I also noticed another new feature which is a little concerning to me. When you type in Miami Real Estate at the top of the natural listings there is a box that lets you choose sales, rentals and vacation rentals. The results bring you into peoples listing on Google Base.
I work with several real estate clients and we work very hard to provide unique content to drive customers to their websites. Is it going to get to the point where a website is irrelevant and everyone is going to have to put their information into a Google owned property like Google Base?
I see many problems arising with this in the future. Real Estate agents are just going to bulk upload property after property to drive traffic to their businesses and to make their phones ring. This will result in lots of lots of duplicate content and make the search irrelevant.
Google should be spending their time driving traffic to other websites not their own properties.
I know this has no bearing on these pages getting indexed but I thought it was funny that Google Finance has numbers similar to a session ID in the URL
http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=655880
>Try a search for “RFID” and it will find companies that operate in the RFID industry.
If you search for “RFID Labels” Printronix comes up no 1 with all thier financial info and then the rest of the companies in a list form below. This gives the impression that Printronix is the leader in RFID label converting, which they are not. My opinion is that no one company should get preferential treatment in the results delivered when searching with keywords in G finance.
Go to http://money.msn.com and type any of the company names you’re interested in th “symbol” box. “Lexmark”, “Google”, “Microsoft”, whatever.
If you like tickers instead, try “LXK GOOG MSFT”, all together.. If something doesn’t work as expected, post a comment.
Matt, I really like the fact that Google Finance also displays blogs related to the stock you are looking up. It looks like Google is using feeds from Weblogs to display relevant blogs. However I have noticed that some of my recent blogs about companies like Network Engines (NENG) and Medifast (MED) are not getting picked up by Google Finance even though these companies are thinly covered in the regular media and the blog universe. I do ping Weblogs every time I update my RSS feeds. Other “finance bloggers” are also perplexed by this exclusion.
If anyone is aware of some sort of filtering mechanism that is used by Google Finance, please do let me know.
Google Finance is well done and works pretty well.
I use it when I play online on some stock market emulators.
It’s really helpful!
Google Finance has improved quite a bit since I last took notice.
Good job by Google!