Some new features arrived in Google’s Finance site, with the big addition being content from events like earnings announcements and analyst calls.
Google Finance Cashes In Updates
Ever since Google Finance launched, it has been compared regularly to the top financial site online, Yahoo Finance. Early comparisons seemed unfair; Google Finance had just debuted, and the company didn’t set out to make a Yahoo Finance clone.
Over time the product has evolved beyond its main trick, a Flash-based stock chart that can be adjusted to automatically show ranges of stock prices. Those ranges also note news events related to the stock, making it easy to see why a security might trend up or down at a particular time.
We have observed another Google product, their Webmaster Central tools, evolve with new features every few months. That looks like the process Google Finance has followed, as Kuldeep Gharat, a Google software engineer, described Google Finance updates on Google’s main blog.
Company events like those earnings and analyst calls are listed on a stocks Google Finance page. Pending events can be added to one’s Google Calendar with a click of the mouse.
Google also added a few smaller tweaks to Finance. A link to historical prices for any US or Canadian company opens a list that can be customized by date range and downloaded in .csv format for use in a spreadsheet.
Portfolio performance and transactions can be downloaded from Google Finance in the same manner. Also, Google provides feeds for stock news that can be added to any feed reader, or to the recently updated and renamed personalized homepages, iGoogle.
Googling Google blogger Garett Rogers, who is based in Canada, noted how Google Finance has become friendlier with stocks traded north of the border.
“For example, now I can register all the stocks I own through the TSE without getting an error telling me I entered an invalid symbol,” he wrote.
