Google unveils Finance Portal

Google Inc., the online search engine leader has launched a financial Web site late Monday. Google Finance is once again set to put the Mountain View search giant in direct competition with Yahoo.

Google Finance, a beta version of the service, uses a keyword search system which helps consumers to get targeted information on public and private companies and mutual funds.

The site, http://finance.google.com is equipped with stock charts, news and chat rooms, just like the most appreciated finance site on web, Yahoo Finance. Experts say that the Google finance site is much improved than the Yahoo finance.
Experts say, in spite of the outstanding qualities of Google Finance, most of the people who are comfortable using the yahoo finance, will be apprehensive to move to the Google finance.

With the new offering up its sleeves, Google is trying to pull down Yahoo as the dominator in web search. Being on parallel lines to Yahoo, this product seeks to shake up the online finance information market now dominated by Internet media rivals and online brokers.

The combat between the two in finance has begun with the strategies adopted to attract the online finance users. Both the companies offer an e-mail platform, a jiffy messaging service and the ability to personalize news pages. On one hand where the Yahoo has been pushing a social networking strategy, providing people ways to interact with each other, such as sharing photos on Flicker, or “tagging” favorite pages with Delicious, Google comes with the strategy which provides a way for people to communicate with each other in chat forums about individual stocks. Moreover, Google Base provides a way to people to upload goods and services they want to sell. Google recently has introduced a service where people can create their own Web sites. A popular Blogger site is also hosted by Google itself.

Though, the battle to reign the online finance is intensified from both the sides, Google has come up with comprehensive improvements in its Google Finance site. For instance, “AJAX” feature, a technology which lets you zoom in to selected date periods with your mouse that Google has used with great effect in Google Maps. Furthermore, if you are wondering why a particular stock had dropped late last year, there will be an icon on a stock chart that you can click, which takes you to news stories on that particular date. Personalized stock information from a home page can also be accessed and customized. Adding to it Google also permits a person to type a company's name into Google's search bar.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, product manager for Google Finance, said “We are going to provide quick, easy access to financial information ... by taking complex financial data and making it more digestible.”