Google launches Google Finance site

Google has launched Google Finance to compete against Yahoo and MSN’s financial service offerings

21 March 2006 8:30 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google has launched Google Finance to compete against Yahoo and MSN's financial service offerings.

According to the new site “Google Finance (finance.google.com) is an early beta product that offers a broad range of information about North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data".

The site, which retains Google's basic design, offers the ability to search for any company listed in North America.

Google has also added interactive charts to help you correlate market data with corresponding dated news stories so you can determine if there is a relationship between them (for instance, by seeing news stories that came out about a certain company in the context of what that company's stock did that day).

You can also click and drag the charts to see different time periods and zoom in to see more detailed information as well as, search for relevant news related to the company in question pulled from its news service.

Google has also added support for blogs and discussion groups into the offering, again pulled from its own feeds.

Finally users will be able to build and store specific portfolios to keep, create and maintain stocks and mutual funds.

So far the offering seems very similar to services offered by Yahoo and MSN. Although available around the globe you can currently only track companies listed in the US.