The cutesy culture at Google might be coming to an end. The company is finally getting serious by dropping the don’t-blame-us-it’s-only-a-beta label on products that have been around for years. We thought apps like Gmail and Google Docs would be the first to lose the beta label because those are sold to enterprise customers. But Google Finance beat them to it. If you go to Google Finance today, you will see that it has quietly dropped the beta label.
It is about time too. Google Finance launched more than three years ago. By now, it is a fully baked finance site. But Google isn’t making a big deal about the fact that Finance is now a full-fledged product. In fact, it isn’t making a big deal about anything on Google Finance. The Google Finance blog hasn’t been updated since last March.
Maybe Google is keeping quiet about its finance site because, despite going at it for three years and driving traffic straight from Google’s search homepage (ticker symbols pull up stock charts from Google Finance), it hasn’t been able to make much inroads against the most popular stock site out there, Yahoo Finance. According to comScore, Google Finance attracted just 1.4 million unique U.S. visitors in April, compared to Yahoo finance’s 21.7 million. In other words, Yahoo Finance is 15.5 times bigger than Google Finance (see chart below). In the past year, Yahoo Finance added 2.2 million monthly unique users in the U.S. In other words, it added more people than Google Finance’s entire audience. The worldwide numbers show a similar disparity, with Yahoo Finance at 43.5 million uniques vs. 2.4 million for Google Finance.
I find both equally informative, but Yahoo Finance is still my default. Old habits die hard.
(Shout out to reader Michael Konen for spotting the change).
I wonder who tipped you off. At any rate, yes, they have moved out of beta BUT, their close prices are still off.
Their market cap prices are off too for OTC/PINK
Take for example EESO
http://www.goog...ance?q=OTC:EESO
The market cap is not 12,570.00, it’s 1.4M since they have 223.7M shares out.
*In no way take this as any type of tip. This company is a penny stock and massively volatile.*
(danger)
ok, with that out of the way, Finance has reported incorrect close prices for various NYSE, and NASDAQ stocks consistently where Yahoo finance had the correct price.
Google finance has no information such as earnings estimates, where Yahoo does, it also doesn’t resell financial reports from various sources such as thestreet.com
So Google Finance is quite a bit more retarded than it’s Yahoo brother. But the ajax graph is nicer and they have a nice Android app.
The OTC stocks are still 15 min delayed, as are the PINKs but they are google and they should be able to afford to get a real time stream for those.
I am still a little disappointed. I would actually like to work on this team. I can’t say that of many teams.
Say you would want to invest in some casino tech like EGT, and you want more info before you click the trade button.
http://finance.....com/q/rr?s=EGT
Yahoo will actually sell you low cost research reports from various sources, to read before you invest.
Yahoo Finance is superior in almost every way, except for the interface. Google got the interface better than Yahoo, but the rest is woahfully inferior.
And way inferior to commander and other real time java interfaces and tools from various online traders. That is to be expected, but the other stuff can be fixed.
Then again Yahoo doesn’t have the Google Finance API. Yahoo wins though for finance.
YQL just recently added a Yahoo! finance API for quotes based on the CSV data that has always been available there:
http://bit.ly/jdsbN
or you could just GET the csv formatted yahoo quotes in less code using any url retrieval tool and end up with a simpler format to parse
Google finance is more than that. You can rebuild your portfolio from Scott trade, ameritrade, ect…
via their API and track and optimize your trades using the historical data. Then synch that to your mobile leveraging their Android platform.
So Yahoo does not have that.
But it’s ok, because Yahoo beats Google at finance with it’s other tools.
These tools would not be hard for Google to build, and they could debug their existing tools, but I am guessing that the finance team is small or under manned.
They certainly need more QA people.
Whats the point in seeing graphs? Unless it allows us to trade with real hard cash…
If the cap is 1.4M, then Yahoo is wrong too, they just listed it at 8M.
Honestly, Pink Sheets are obscure to begin with, I don’t think that affects where a decent amount of people go.
It does because in this bad economy investors are turning to the OTC and PINK. More and more companies are doing IPOs on the OTC instead of NASDAQ because the requirements are too high in this bad economic environment.
Google also does not have level 2 quotes, IE the candles, and a last trade volume streamer.
So many things are missing. The only thing they got really right is the ajax graph.
Their news CMS widget is also way the heck off.
Check Capital Trust CT’s news column on the top left side.
http://www.goog...nance?q=NYSE:CT
The top articles aren’t even about Capital Trust from NYC, they are about some company from Canada(of all places).
So to pull this out of beta, I think was premature. Imagine Ameritrade having this level of inaccuracy with people putting real money down. And they want us to transfer our financial portfolio’s including our trades over to their API.
First they need to prove that they can get it right before dropping the beta tag.
I actually like Google Finance better than yahoo and have fully churned. I guess I am in the minority.
I hear ya – I use Google Finance for the most part as well. However, Google doesn’t do options or indepth analysis of stocks. It’s great for looking at the company stock price, but terrible for anything beyond an AJAX stock graph.
Same here. I’m in a transition period where I check Google Finance on a daily basis but sometimes go to Yahoo Finance for other information. I much prefer the Google Finance interface, but Yahoo still has more content that I want to refer to every now and then.
I too am a google finance user… probably its b’coz I never tried Y! finance.
As finance sites go, Google seems to have built theirs in a “Engineer A thinks finance oriented people want this”.
Yahoo actually has stuff finance people really want. And much better charts. Google approached the problem as an aggregator of search results maybe.
Anyways, Yahoo rules finance compared to google.
http://www.traderbots.com
They announced a Google Finance Android App:
http://phandroi...ation-launches/
I prefer Google Finance to Yahoo Finance but I agree, much a matter of preference/habit. But for that matter I used to use MyYahoo, switched to Google Reader, and never looked back.
All in good time sir, all in good time.
The Google Finance Android app has been out for several months. They updated the mobile app about a month ago to include OTC stocks.
old news.
Funny, because they forgot to remove the beta label from the bottom of the page:
“Google Finance Beta available in: U.S….”
they should have stayed in beta and they would have been ok!
Google Finance is still missing basic information like P/E ratios on stocks that Yahoo Finance almost always has. The charts are fancy though.
I guess substance won.
Funny. I see the PE ratio right there on the top.. just like it’s always been since I first started using it.
It really depends what you need to track. I’ve been using http://www.sanebull.com/m (SaneBull Monitor) for a while now and its good for a casual overlook of the market thats better than both Y and G Finances…
when you go in the finance message boards, it still shows Beta. They aren’t very organized obviously.
yahoo news and finance are two things this aging dinosaur still does right. they should spin them off so these products can be untethered from the rest of the sinking ship before it is too late
I guess not many people know about this, but Google has been testing a new interface for Google Finance.
its one of those things where they test on random people. It just loads instead of the normal site.
It happened to me last week and DAMN!
It blows any other finance site away. Beautiful new interface. I didn’t check to see if the info has changed.
I wonder if anyone has a screenshot.
Yahoo wins because of the company info/stats it receives from its partnership with S&P’s Capital IQ.
This is the kind of stuff Bartz was referring to when she went on the offensive with Jim Goldman.
I was a long time user of Yahoo! Finance but then began using Google Finance because you would immediately get a drop down of all the possible stocks you were interested in as you typed in the ticker. Not to mention you didn’t even need to remember the ticker – you could type in the name. But for awhile now Yahoo! has had the same functionality so now I go back and forth. Yahoo! by far has a better and more reliable set of available stats. Would agree that Google threw a team of Engineers at the problem without doing their market research first – how about showing the previous close price, for example? Ask a banking analyst or corp dev person how often they use that one data point. It’s a lot.
Where’s that Timothy Sykes douche when you need to pump those OTC’s!?
If Google wanted to dominate, they would provide technical analysis charting tools, similar to eSignal or Interactive Brokers, and of course make them free. The biggest feature on sites like that is back testing.
Say you come up with a new set of trading rules(e.g. buy on 50 day high, sell on 10 day low, etc). Back testing allows you to figure how how this strategy works, $ wise, on one or many stocks, over a user specified duration. This would would be huge.
If Google wanted to dominate, they would provide technical analysis charting tools, similar to eSignal or Interactive Brokers, and of course make them free. The biggest feature on sites like that is back testing.
Say you come up with a new set of trading rules(e.g. buy on 50 day high, sell on 10 day low, etc). Back testing allows you to figure how how this strategy works, $ wise, on one or many stocks, over a user specified duration. This would would be huge.
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!