Google Finance is, well, okay
The blogosphere is screaming with news of the launch of Google Finance. This may be a bit of a rhetorical question but why is it that everything Google unveils is treated like they've invented the lightbulb? I mean, there have been finance sites - and really good ones such as Motley Fool and Yahoo Finance - around for years. But when Google moves into a market, it's like we all have to race over and fawn over their new baby. Aside from Google Earth, can anyone show me a new mind-blowing service from Google? Out of the gate, Google Finance is, well, okay. It looks like Google News with a stock chart sitting at the top. Om Malik shares this sentiment, describing Google Finance as “simply disappointing”, while Mr. Wave Theory suggests Google's service launches have failed because they do not create value for itself or investors. John Battelle suggests this is the first time Google has moved into publishing because it's hiring paid moderators. I think that's a stretch. To me, Google Finance is just a natural off-shoot of Google News with perhaps a few bells and whistles. But as long as everyone remains obsessed with everything Google, I guess we'll have to live with the misplaced hype about anything new.
Update: A couple other things I wanted to mention: one, I should concede the service provides some pretty good information once you do a search on a particular company. For one, I like the fact it provides blog posts. That said, suggestions Google Finance puts Google into the content/portal game really don't hold water given users are pushed off to rivals such as Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and AOL Finance to get more information.
March 21st, 2006 at 8:28 am
I think the “value add” is when you actually look up stock information - there is a scrollable share price graph tagged with news events so you can see how news presumably has affected the price.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:35 am
Mark, I think you are really underestimating the significance of this move. As I said over on Battelle's blog, this is Game On.
This marks a significant move for GOOG, and every other vertical should be taking this as a wake-up call. Why? Well, beyond the move to content creation, it marks the first serious move into portal-esque behaviour, where the eyeballs stay inside Google's tent. The big message here is that it says that they are willing to take the search revenue hit in a big category in order to try to build their own audience. For one, travel players must be terrified - this is the signal they and others no doubt have been waiting for, and hoping would never come.
This is really big.
- Stuart
March 21st, 2006 at 2:45 pm
I just have a image in my mind about Google's empire.
They have the top one search engine, I think. It can be used to orginazed all different kinds of information, like wabpages, emails, newsgroups, forums, blogs, news, chatting records, videos, books. Now it is finance, most profitable side.
I guess Google may or will purchase some finance services provider, to provide stock transaction online without commission, or with very low commission. This will be huge crash on Wall Street.
March 21st, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Putting a bigger lock on Google users should bode well for ad revs but is no guarantee. Extending this to include charts for UK/Bourse/DAX would be a significant step in the right direction for users. Putting the blog posts immediately after MSM listings would be more helpful. Reducing the size of the ridiculously large graphs would also help. And they did extensive internal testing? Like you I'm lukewarm - I really want to know where the GOOG business model fits.
March 22nd, 2006 at 12:13 pm
And so it begins. The collective web minds are finally getting bored with Google!
In my mind, Google has killed the internet star. I miss the days when I would open up Netscape and click the 'What's Cool' link to find interesting stuff on the Web!