WSJ released the news that Google Finance is about to launch. Actually, the site is available at finance.google.com. Take a quick look at its summary for Microsoft. The stock chart looks cool, but the entire site does not really set itself apart from Yahoo! Finance or MSN Money though. If there is anything surprising, it is a site without ad :-)
From
Wall Street Journal:
Google Finance follows the traditional recipe for such offerings, providing a mix of stock quotes and charts, company news and corporate data. It is too early to know whether Google Finance will steal users from existing offerings, but the Mountain View, Calif., Internet company's broad consumer reach and recent success with new services such as Google Maps suggest its arrival could cause established providers of online financial news and data to react.
Google said the quality of interactive charts, the breadth of its news sources and its skill at pulling in other information from the Web will set it apart from rivals.
Yahoo's Finance site attracted the most U.S. visitors of all financial-news-and-information sites in February, with about 12 million visitors, according to research firm NetRatings Inc. The financial sites of Microsoft's MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s CNN were second and third, with 11 million and 8.5 million visitors, respectively. Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newspaper, owns financial Web sites including The Wall Street Journal Online and MarketWatch.com.
Unlike many other finance sites, Google doesn't have its own editorial staff. As with its existing Google News site, it provides links to other sites that do for financial and company news, tapping more than 4,500 English-language sources for the news. Google is licensing some market data and other information from sources such as Hoover's Inc., Morningstar Inc. and Reuters Group PLC for inclusion on its site. It is also providing links to relevant Web logs and creating Google Groups where users can post commentary about specific companies.
