Posted by : Anonymous on Mar 22, 2006 - 12:20 AM Hardware

Google unveiled a financial Web site late Monday, Google Finance, which once again puts the Mountain View search giant in direct competition with Yahoo.The site, http://finance.google .com, provides stock charts, news and chat rooms, much like Yahoo Finance, the most popular finance site on the Web. Analysts say Google Finance makes several improvements over Yahoo's, but the changes aren't so radical as to confuse people who are already familiar with Yahoo Finance.
While Google has begun to pull away from Yahoo as the dominant force in Web search, Google Finance is the latest product to compete with Yahoo's personalized offerings. Yahoo has long provided a way for people to customize Yahoo Finance, so they can organize stock listings in a private portfolio and subscribe to financial news alerts, for example.

Millions of people already are comfortable using Yahoo Finance and other services such as MarketWatch or Reuters, and many of them are unlikely to move no matter how stellar Google makes its service, analysts say.

But the battle in finance is similar to others the two companies have waged. They both offer an e-mail platform, an instant messaging service and the ability to personalize news pages.

Yahoo, meanwhile, has been pushing a social networking strategy, providing people with ways to interact with each other, such as sharing photos on Flickr, or "tagging" favorite pages with Delicious.

Imitating strategies

Google Finance appears to mimic Yahoo's strategy even closer, by providing a way for people to communicate with each other in chat forums about individual stocks.

Furthermore, Google hosts the popular Blogger site, and recently unveiled a service where people can create their own Web sites. Google Base gives people a way to upload goods and services they want to sell. A calendar product is due out shortly.

Google Finance's improvements come in several areas. For example, if a user is wondering why Cisco System's stock took a dip late last year, there will be an icon on a stock chart to click, which takes users to news stories on that date.

"Some of those features are really nice," said Greg Sterling, an analyst with the Kelsey Group.

Google lets users zoom in to selected date periods with their mouse, a so-called "AJAX" feature, a technology that Google has used with great effect in Google Maps.

Additionally, a person can access personalized stock information from a home page that Google lets one customize. Google also allows a person to type a company's name into Google's search bar. On Yahoo, a user must find a company's ticker symbol before he is able to search for company information.

No ads for now

Google pulls company news from 4,500 sources that it collects by crawling the Web. Google also struck partnerships with various vendors of company information, such as Hoovers and Revere Data, a San Francisco company.

The company will not put ads on the site in the short term, said Katie Jacobs Stanton, senior product manager at Google.

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