Google Finance: less clutter, more value

I awoke this morning to discover that Google launched its beta finance portal site last night. My initial reaction: Google has a winner with this site. Why? Two important reasons:

1. Integrated smart search. On Google Finance, if I search for "ipod", I get the stock report for Apple Computer, even though that's not what I searched for. Try that on Yahoo and MSN, and you get very different and less relevant results. Google Finance understands the intent of users to research financial data, and gives you financial data. Smart.


2. Strong design for insight. I find myself fed up with Yahoo's cluttered, yet static portfolio and stock pages. The information is often there, but you just can't find it. Google Finance presents less information to the user at the top level, but makes that information clear and interactive for those that want to drill down. So if I want to find out how Google's stock price has reacted to various news events over the last year, the news events are plotted on an interactive graph I can expand, contract, and dive into as I want. Google has given more thought to the user and what they want instead of doing a data dump. And given the tyranny of too much, they have created huge value for those users.

One more thing that Google got right, in my opinion, is they seem to understand the tradeoff between security and convenience for the user. For years, Yahoo's hypocritical attitude toward online security has bugged me. Yahoo was always happy to log me into my financial information using a cookie on my computer without a moment's hesitation. But if I want to read my spam-clogged Yahoo email, it requires I type in my password again. Hello? Google makes no such mistake; on my very first visit to finance.google.com, it happily logged me in with by Google account. I expect I'll have to reverify my password about once every two weeks.

I've been a near-decade user of Yahoo Finance. But based upon my initial reactions to Google Finance, I'm moving my information to the Googleplex. I'm sure it is less than perfect, but if this is the beta, I can't wait for when it's really done.

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