Google Finance

Google Finance has launched and I really like the layout. They seem to be heading towards the portal business though a different route than yahoo. While Yahoo gives you the portal as soon as you show up, Google seems to be going the route of only providing the “My Yahoo” type portion. I think they may keep their homepage simple while allowing those with google accounts to create their personal portal of information. Of course this is just a guess and the connections between the products aren’t very concrete yet. There doesn’t seem to be ads yet so that may change things.

A few things I like:

• The data display is really nice and makes it easy to look at various trends. You can change the scale of the graph and then move through time with that scale.
• The plotting of news on the graph
• Clean look. Yahoo Finance needs some cleaning/updating.
• The integration of blogs and google groups in the page

John Battelle also has a post with some information on this and the portal tension.

First, this marks a rolling shift at Google - the company is getting into publishing, whether or not it wants to admit it. The product manager, Katie Jacobs Stanton, admitted as much when we spoke - Google Finance will have a Groups section where stocks are discussed with paid moderators - that's editors to you and me. And that's a shift, a shift that is worth noting.