:: The Park Paradigm ::

Markets for the Digital Generation

There are thousands of column inches already out there describing Google’s entry into the online-finance-portal arena, so there isn’t much point in me repeating or rehashing a factual review of their inaugural offering (for a good summary see Rob Carrick’s review from the Globe and Mail) and the following comment from a post on Internet outsider is one that I would agree with:

I am an analyst at a large I-bank and as you can imagine Yahoo Finance is a very valuable resource that we primarily use for quick, general reference. Well after using Google Finance for just a few minutes (and please, type in a company name and see where it takes you before concretizing your opinion on the site), my colleagues/friends that I have spoken with both here and at other firms are definitely switching over.

And here’s why:
- Clean, simple interface that is extremely easy to navigate
- In general, all relevant info is right on the page in front of you (as opposed to on Yahoo where its on sub pages that you need to link to)
- Excellent combination of AJAX and Google’s search tech for the really cool annotated historical stock price graph
- Direct links to tons of relevant additional information (ex. investor relations and other pages from the company, recent news stories, comparable companies, management details, etc.)
- Blog postings! This is a very interesting touch that connects the user to other simple users – absent the filter of big media. This personalizes the information available at your fingertips.

Even with all the great features available on Google Finance, the most unique differentiator between this site and Yahoo Finance is that Google’s site is merely a content AGGREGATOR (like Google News), and not a content PRODUCER. It is really in this capacity that the new finance site is right inline with everything else Google throws out to us users.

Now I am not saying this site is perfect – in fact, it still lacks some of the useful data breakouts that Yahoo provides – but it is an excellent first step, one that is clearly unique from, and an improvement over, Yahoo’s and other free offerings.

Google’s stated goal was to “to improve the search experience for financial information” and (despite a restricted universe of geographies and instruments to start with) makes a good first impression.

Nothing they are doing so far hasn’t been thought of before (as Jeremy Zawodny laments on his blog), but actually acting on those ideas and building it is the key. It reminds me of a project I scoped a few years back for the bank that I work for that never really saw the light of day due to a lack of resources and the usual problem of the urgent getting in the way of the important. It also reminds me to some extent of the Markit portal (unfortunately login only and no demo, sorry - however there is a screenshot here) that have taken an analogous approach to organising financial data. If I recall correctly, I believe Markit use Relegence to organise and map their news and information feeds.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves, obviously the possibilities are endless - it really depends on what ambitions Google have for this in the short, medium and long term and what resources they want to dedicate to developing this.

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