A Brand New Look and Feel for Google Finance!

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 12:23 PM

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager

Over the last few months, we experimented with some changes on the site. We tried a couple of new layouts and received lots of feedback and suggestions from users and Googlers alike. Now, we're excited to launch a newly redesigned Google Finance!


Our goal, first and foremost, was to make our current market data, news, and portfolios easily accessible from anywhere on the site. To that end, the most obvious change is the addition of a left-hand navigation bar that lets you move between the major sections of the site in one click.

Links to sub-sections, like Portfolio-related news or individual portfolios, let you dive even deeper.

We're also launching a number of new features to Google Finance that we hope give you more access to data and provide added flexibility.

• You can now plot your favorite technical indicators (Simple Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, etc.) on the Google Finance charts by clicking the Technicals link under the chart. Plus you can view OHLC and Candlestick charts too. Click Settings under any chart to get started. (We're really happy about this launch, specifically; technical indicators were one of our most highly requested features.)






• Streaming real-time Recent Quotes are now displayed on the left-hand navigation bar and are hence accessible from any page on the site.





• Comparing related companies is now easy with our new interactive tool. From any company's summary page (for example, CSCO's), click Add or Remove Columns in the Related Companies section, and add the financial metrics you want to track.





• You can customize the homepage. If you see a small drop-down arrow on the right side of a section's title bar, that section can be moved around the page. Click the arrow, and you can choose to move that section up, move it down, move it all the way to the top of the page, or minimize it.

So take a tour around the site -- click around the left-nav, play with the technical indicators; move some sections around the page -- and let us know what you think. If you have feedback or questions, visit the Help Center.

Cheers,
Ayan

Shhh...testing in progress

Friday, March 27, 2009 at 2:26 PM

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager

Over the course of the next few weeks, you might notice a few changes to Google Finance. We will be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback. They will only be visible to a small number of random Google Finance users. (In case you're wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can't give you any advice for how to get in!)

It's pretty normal for us to run this kind of test, as we're always working to improve the experience of using Google Finance . In fact, experiments like these are a cornerstone of Google's development process - here's a post on the Official Google Blog explaining this practice for our search results.

Finance for Android application launched

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 3:19 PM

Posted by Arun Mathew, lead engineer, and Nick Fey, user experience designer 

A year ago here at Google, an engineer (Arun Mathew) and a user experience designer (Nick Fey) set out to build a Finance mobile application for Android that would both showcase the possibilities of this new mobile OS and be a lightning fast way for users to access their Google Finance portfolios.  The original goal was to address the frustration of having to set up all the stocks you want to track when using a new mobile portfolio; we're excited to have delivered on this goal for our users. You will notice that the first time you open the Android app, your portfolio is automatically downloaded in the background and it continually syncs with the Google Finance when running, so any changes on the phone will be seen on the website. 

As the application took shape we added additional features with the aim of allowing users to get stock quotes, market data and news as fast as possible. Highlights include real-time streaming quotes in your portfolio, rapid stock look-ups with search auto-suggestion, and 'recent quotes' to speed up receiving quotes on-the-go; for each stock there are detailed quotes, charts and news available.  At the moment, this financial data is restricted to US exchanges only.

Throughout development we attracted additional engineers and designers, all volunteering their 20% time. A special thanks goes out to David Fuchs, David Ko, and Bob Rose for all the time and effort spent building the application, as well as to the many other engineers and designers that helped make this a product worth launching.

Finance for Android is available now on the Android marketplace or you can install it with this barcode if you have the barcode scanner application.

Screenshots:

Markets view

Portfolios view

Company page

Stock quote lookup displaying autosuggest

Ads on Google Finance

Monday, November 17, 2008 at 3:38 PM

Posted by R.J. Pittman, Director, Product Management


We've introduced something new to Google Finance. You will notice we are now displaying small, targeted advertisements on some pages of Google Finance. The ads are visible on the homepage next to the market summary, and on company summary pages below the first few news stories. We have worked carefully to integrate the advertising to enhance the user experience. Our goal is to always show you relevant ads that you will find useful. Google Finance is now positioned to bring users a choice of relevant financial information and services through contextual advertising. And as with all of our products and search properties, we'll be continually working to increase the quality of the ads and the overall usefulness of the site.

If you want more information about the ads on Google Finance, visit the Help Center. From there, you can also send feedback using our suggestion form. Additionally, you can read more about our new advertising initiatives in the latest post on our company blog.

Plot Feeds is back

Friday, August 22, 2008 at 8:13 AM

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager

And ... we're back. You can once again view blogs and plot feeds on Google Finance charts. Access to blogs provides a greater range of information than conventional news alone; plotting a particular feed lets you view its information in the context of a stock's performance.

Click the 'Blogs' tab from any company's summary page, and you'll see the blogosphere's coverage of that company plotted along the chart. Or, if you want to plot specific blogs on the chart -- blogs you know, blogs you search for, or blogs you write -- click the 'Feeds' tab. Search for a blog or type its URL, and the blog posts will be plotted on the company's chart, making it easy for you to discover the blogs that provide high-quality analysis and breaking news.

Try this feature out and let us know what you think. Stay tuned for more as we continue to enhance Google Finance.

Plot Feeds unavailable for the moment

Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 3:16 PM

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager

As you may have noticed, the Google Finance site was inaccessible to some users for several hours earlier this morning. We’ve now restored the site, but it will take us a bit longer to restore the blogs and feeds feature that we launched yesterday.

We’re working feverishly on a fix and will let you know as soon as these features are back up.

If you're experiencing any technical difficulties, we encourage you to visit the Google Finance Help Center.

Plotting more than news on the charts

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 7:29 AM

Posted by Vivi Costache, 20% Charting Wizard

Plotting news stories on the company charts has always been one of my favorite features of Google Finance. Today, I'm happy to announce that we're pushing it even further!

First,you'll notice that we moved the Blogs section to a tab next to the News area. When you select the blog tab, relevant blog posts are listed and charted just like the news items, making it easier to see the blogosphere's coverage of your favorite stocks.

We've also added a tab called Feeds. There are a few ways you can use this tab:

• Search for relevant feeds by typing keywords in the query box. Relevant results (like blogs or news feeds) are listed so you can choose which one to plot onto the chart, just like news stories and blog posts.
• Use addresses from blogs you know, blogs you've written, or blogs you just found that you think are relevant to a stock. For example, one of my favorite URLs is http://AAPL.bloggingstocks.com/rss.xml. Enter it in the query box and you can see the news about Apple from bloggingstocks.com as flags on a company chart (hint: it works for most other symbols too!).

• Use data from Google Spreadsheets. If you keep notes in a Google Spreadsheet about your investing decisions, you can publish that spreadsheet to the web and plot the entries along any Google Finance chart.

And best of all, if you find a blog or create a useful spreadsheet that you'd like to share with others, you can click "Link to chart" to send a link to your friends.

For more advanced tricks for the Feeds tab, you can visit our Help Center to learn more.

We're hoping this feature will encourage more, and more meaningful content creation by analysts, bloggers, and users alike. By giving users more content to compare with the stock performance over time we hope to help investors make financial decisions that are as informed as possible.

As always, let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Google Finance invests in Google Data

Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 4:18 PM

Posted by Casey Ho and Steven Soneff, Software Engineering Interns

Our team is pleased to announce the release of a data API for Google Finance portfolios. This means that developers can build financial software that could give you easy access to your portfolios on your desktop, homepage, or mobile phone. If you know something about writing software and are interested in making this happen, check out the details on the Google Data API blog and let us know what you come up with!

It's raining real-time quotes!

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 6:45 AM

Posted by Matthew Simmons, Market Data Gnome; Ayan Mandal, Product Manager

Today, we're pleased to extend the availability of real-time quotes on Google Finance, Google.com and other Google search properties to include companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). We've partnered with the NYSE on a pilot project that enables us to offer users free access to more real-time stock quotes. Now you can follow companies listed on both NASDAQ and NYSE in a streaming real-time fashion every second of every day -- well, at least while the market is open.

As you know, we worked with the NYSE and SEC last year to make this data more accessible to our users and we're happy to finally see it come to fruition. Our goal is to provide our users with the tools and content that help them manage their portfolios, stay informed about breaking market changes, and easily access the financial information they're looking for. Providing up-to-the-second market data from two of the largest exchanges in the US helps us achieve that goal.

As always, if you encounter problems or have suggestions, please let us know.

Custom date range on the charts

Monday, June 23, 2008 at 8:31 AM

Posted by Andre Lebedev, Software Engineer

We are happy to have launched custom date entry on our charts. Try clicking the mouse over the date range in the top right corner and enter the exact date range for which you want the chart to be set.

Want to see the chart for all of 2007? Enter '2007' as start date, and '2008' as your end date, and the chart will reset to display the stock price for all trading dates of 2007.Want to see the chart for February of 2008? Enter '2008-02' for start date and '2008-03' for end date.

If you encounter problems or have suggestions, please let us know.