If you go to Google Finance on your iPhone or Android via the mobile browser, it looks a lot like an app. You can enter a ticker symbol or company name in the search box at the top to generate a current price and stock chart. Three buttons on top let you switch from a market view to your saved portfolio to news.
The new mobile-friendly design just launched yesterday. (It is still catching up to Yahoo Finance, which has been mobile browser friendly for a while). The new mobile Google Finance presents most of the same information you can find on the main Website in a single, scrollable column: recent quotes, market charts, financial news headlines, a visual summary showing how different sectors are doing, and a list of gainers and losers. → Read More
In case you haven’t been on Twitter in the past 20 minutes, the U.S. stock market is collapsing. Well, it was collapsing (the Dow was down over 1,000 points at one point), but now it’s bouncing back. But you’d be forgiven if you have no idea what’s going on just from watching the web, because frankly, it’s struggling to keep up.
It appears that under the weight of just about everyone checking the web to see what’s happening with the market, sites are failing left and right. Google Finance keeps bringing up an error message to “please try again in 30 seconds.” Yahoo Finance, meanwhile is completely down. Trying to look for the news via Twitter, meanwhile, yields mixed results. At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600, etc. The problem is that the “realtime” web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were crashing. → Read More
You’ve heard of realtime stock quotes. Nearly every finance site has those. Now Google Finance is adding realtime news streams. If you go to its market news page, the stories will update automatically without refreshing the page, kind of like updates on FriendFeed but not as frequent.
Looking at it now, new stories are updating only every minute or two, so I’m not sure how useful this is going to be most of the time. But when a stock-related story is breaking, it could be very compelling, giving you a sense of how quickly market information is reported.
Perhaps that is why the news stream will only be turned on during trading hours. It switches back to the static news page 90 minutes after trading ends in the U.S. and starts up again the next morning 90 minutes before. → Read More
Google has launched a new area of Google Finance called “Google Domestic Trends.” Basically, it allows you to look at various sectors of the U.S. economy based on how they are performing in Google’s search index. The idea is that the volume of searches for related queries to a specific segment may “provide unique economic insight,” says Google.
That’s an interesting idea, but does is it actually smart to invest based on one search engine’s data? Google has a few compelling examples for why it could be. → Read More
It’s been more than a month since Google Finance shed its beta label, and finally today it is rolling out some design tweaks it has been testing out for the past few months.
In the screen shot above you can see most of the changes. There is now a persistent navigation bar on the left with links to news, portfolios, historical prices, and financials. In the left column, you also now see streaming live quotes for the most recent stock tickers you’ve entered. It is a sparer version of the left-hand column on Yahoo Finance, with more dynamic and personalized content. → Read More
This morning it appears that a number of Google services are having problems. We first noticed last night when our Google Analytics account wasn’t reporting any new data since 9am yesterday, but Analytics is often notoriously slow in receiving updates. This morning there were no further updates with our Analytics data, and in addition to that we have heard reports that both Google Finance and Gmail were and still are also having problems. Below is a screenshot of the Techcrunch stats from Google Analytics from yesterday, showing the sudden drop in hits being recorded. It appears that the outages have affected a subset of Google’s servers and only those servers that are responsible for collecting analytics data and serving both Finance and Gmail for some users. Despite the huge capacity that Google has, and with plans for multiple new large datacenters across the country – they still at times experience outages on some of their services. Google is so big and so popular that even the slightest outage or problem is felt across the web. Since becoming open to all for registration for free, Google Analytics has become a very popular service, especially amongst bloggers. A quick scan of Technorati or Google Blogsearch results shows a large number of bloggers who have been reporting the outage in the past few hours. Search Engine Roundtable was amongst the first to report the issue with Google finance (see the screenshot below, courtesy of their post) GigaOm is also reporting the outages, and as yet there has been no official word from Google nor from any of the Google blogs or bloggers. Analytics has been affected for more than 24 hours now, the other problems seem random. If you have any news on any other outages to other Google services, or if you know what went wrong, leave a comment here. We will continue to try to find out what has happen and to get an official word from Google. Update: It seems that other Google services are also down, namely Google News (story and screenshot at Google Blogoscoped) and users having problems with Blogger (from our comments below, see the error page here). The Google Analytics blog has a post that says the system is down for maintenance, and that users should be able to see a full update of all their date ‘by the end of the day’ (assuming they mean → Read More
The rumor is that Google internally tested Google Finance through two full versions before releasing it today, and the extra attention shows. This is a great looking product overall. And they’ve taken things at least a step further than Yahoo Finance in its current form. The included information is similar to Yahoo Finance for public companies (stuff that can be scoured from public SEC reports and company related news), but there are some key new features: Use of Flash for charts to change features like timeline on the fly; drag and drop to move back in time Use of Ajax on the home page to switch between market views (Nasdaq, NYSE, etc.) Inclusion of recent blog entries relating to the company (see link in first bullet above) Private company information The flash charts are loading very slowly right now, i assume this will improve. The last bullet above is really interesting – they’ve created some original content for private companies and have indexed more from the web. Google Finance information will also be displayed at the top of normal seach results for public companies, in what they call the One Box area. Om says Google Finance is dissapointing and is little more than a “me too” on Yahoo. But in this case I disagree and am happy to give a nod to Google – Other than the very slow Flash charts, I like it, and I think this will push Yahoo to move its own finance property forward. More on Google Finance at John Battelle, SEW and Memeorandum. → Read More
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