Google Redesigns Stock Quotes Widget, Removes Links To Competitors

Stock quotes have long been a staple on Google’s search results pages and date back to the search engine’s earliest days. Since its launch, the stock quotes widget has gone through a few iterations and today, it looks like the company has launched a redesigned version.

There are no new features here as far as I can see. The new widget has a slightly cleaner look, bringing it more in line with the rest of Google’s tools. For the most part, Google moved the buttons that allow you to select different timeframes to the bottom of the widget.

new_google_stock_quotes_widget

One thing users will notice, though, is that the company removed the links to its competitors Yahoo Finance and MSN Money that had been prominently featured at the bottom of each widget. Those were always featured on Google’s search results pages – even in early versions of the widget.

Back when Google first launched these kinds of widgets that featured its own services, having these links as part of the package helped the company deflect criticism that it was favoring its own services over those of its competitors. At one point, Google also linked to AOL, CNN and Reuters, but it dropped those links with the last redesign back in 2012.

Google obviously continues to link to its competitors’ finance sites, but the prominent links to the stock charts on these sites seem to be gone for now.

We have reached out to Google about this change and will update this post once we hear back.

Update: A previous version of this post stated that Google introduced stock quotes with the introduction of “universal search” back in 2007. Turns out, that’s just when it pushed its own widget to the top. Stock quotes existed within the search results since before 2007. Mea culpa.