Review of Google Finance

Google just grew a little bigger. Today, Google launched a new Google Finance web site to compete with Yahoo Finance and Morningstar.

Like Yahoo's site, Google Finance provides recent news, market information, stock quotes, charts, and stats and facts about stocks and funds.

Google one-ups Yahoo's finance site by making their charts more interactive- you can drag the chart to scroll forward or back in time (and the news articles move along correspondingly too).

Google does a good job of linking to external data sources such as SEC filings from EDGAR Online, Analyst Estimates from The Street.com, Reserach Reports on Yahoo Finance, and more. In addition, their page also incorporates recent blog articles and discussion group articles for a particular stock or fund as well.

It's still in beta and is missing some things that Yahoo has. First is completeness- for instance DBC (Deutche Bank Commodities ETF), a recently introduced commodities index fund, is missing from their system as of this writing. Also, they don't provide any stock or fund screeners and calculators.

Overall, Google Finance is a good solid entrance into the financial information vertical. I think of the three finance portals that I have mentioned in this article, Morningstar's is the best. Morningstar's free infomation is excellent, just edging out Google and Yahoo Finance. Additionally, with a PAID subscription, Morningstar's content is light years beyond Yahoo and Google's free sites in terms of useful information in my opinion (Yahoo does, however, also let you buy premium content). Yahoo's site is in a narrow second place, but Google's site is on the verge of surpassing Yahoo's site if they just round out their feature set, which I'm sure they will, since Google Finance is still in beta.