Google Opens Beta of Google Finance

Today, Google is launching Google Finance Beta, a new way for users to search for and find financial information about public and private companies, as well as mutual funds.

Google Finance Beta

Our goal with Google Finance is to enhance the user experience when searching for financial information and make this information useful and digestible for all types of users. Google Finance also strives to offer users a new way to understand stock performance.

While a lot of sites can tell users a stock moved, Google Finance offers context as to why by incorporating relevant news and blog postings. Say a favorite stock hit a high three months ago. Users can click and drag on an interactive stock chart to view the company’s performance in different time periods and map related news events to the stock. So, if a major company announcement or an analyst upgrade helped give the stock a boost, users will be able to more easily see a correlation between that information.

Some of the highlights in Google Finance Beta include:

• Interactive Charts – Google Finance takes financial charts one step further by mapping market data with corresponding news stories in one interactive chart, so users can track news to stock performance. In addition, users can click and drag on the charts to see different time periods, and zoom in/out for more detailed information.
• Search – Unlike many financial sites, Google Finance lets users search for public and private companies, as well as mutual funds, using both company names and ticker symbols. Users can also search for companies by the names of management team members.
• News – Google Finance integrates the Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Google News is clustered in groups by news topic, rather than listed by date, so users do not have to scroll through multiple headlines on the same news story.
• Blogs – Google Finance incorporates blog postings for related company information from Google Blog Search.
• Discussion Groups – Google Finance helps users connect with each other by offering high quality discussion forums. To help ensure a high-quality experience, we have a team of folks dedicated to keeping the discussion groups free of spam and irrelevant posts.
• Portfolios – Google Finance offers a fast and easy way to create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.

Google Finance is a free service, accessible from http://finance.google.com, the symbols on users' Google personalized homepages and Google Desktop Sidebars, or by entering a ticker symbol into any Google search box.

Google Finance was designed to provide information about U.S. and international exchanges, companies and funds. Although the product is mostly focused on the North American market currently, you’ll see some international content on markets in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, Paris and Toronto. We are committed to adding additional international content as quickly as possible.

Additional information is available in today's blog post at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ and a reviewer's guide will be available shortly on our press center http://www.google.com/press/guides.html.