Skip to main content

Google Finance vs Yahoo Finance

Google Finance offers most of the features already offered by Yahoo Finance. It even offers some unique features, such as interactive charts and company-related blogs. But are they enough to dethrone Yahoo Finance, the most popular finance website ? Read this comparison GOOG vs YHOO

The obvious URL
yahoo.com/finance returns a 404 while google.com/finance takes you to Google Finance portal.
Yahoo should be smart here and redirect users to finance.yahoo.com.
When you type finance.google.com, Google redirects to finance.google.com/finance - Why that extra finance after the subdomain ?

Front Page
Google has no ads. If you have signed in with a Google account, you will see stock quotes and news related to your recent searches. These section remain hidden if you there's no search history.
Yahoo Finance front page has ads at acceptable locations. More information is available like currency exchange rates, mortgage rates and links to finance related websites arranged in categories.

Stock Quote Search
Yahoo Finance requires you to remember the exact ticker symbol. Though there's a Yahoo Symbol lookup table, I think it should be integrated with primary stock search. The Yahoo Stock Screener lets you find stocks based on criteria like industry, share prices and other data.

Google Finance is smart. If you enter name of a company, even in part, Google does a "I'm feeling luck" search and takes you to the associated Stock information page. If Google doesn't find the stock company, it shows the resuls from Companies and Funds for you to choose from.

Google Finance has an integrated screener though not as advanced as Yahoo. You can enter an industry like "Magazine" and Google shows a list of companies associated with the Magazine publishing industry.

Stock Charts and other Information
The Google Finance page for Adobe looks really ugly on my Widescreen notebook. The "Flash" stock chart is too huge and occupies more than half the width of the screen. Yahoo has a much cleaner interface and looks more professional.

Google uses lot of Ajax and Flash, you can see stock quotes between custom dates with refreshing your page (like GMail or Google Maps). Then there a previews of Company Executive pictures, Links to related companies (or competitors).

Yahoo offers a more traditional look, the stock related information like Company profile, Balance Sheet, etc are all neatly arranged in the sidebar which I think is a better approach that Google finance. If I am check Adobe Stock several times a day, would I be interested in seeing the picture of Bruce Chizen each time ?

Blogs and Forum Posts
Google shows related blog posts. It essentially searches for the company name using Google Blogsearch and displays the top three results. This is of little or no significance as the posts can be misleading. While looking at the Adobe stock page, I could see a blog post selling pirated Adobe software. This is bad example considering that typically high-income, well-educated adults visit Finance websites.

The forum posts (Google groups discussions) are relatively better since they are moderated by Google staff. So it becomes difficult to flame Google in these forums.

Conclusion
There is already news that Yahoo is revamping the Yahoo Finance portal with new information, multimedia, and style features. Yahoo plans to make stock charts more dynamic and will incorporate sound, motion and video in the site.

Google Finance portal will prevent Google visitors from going elsewhere. Google has definitely made a good start but the Google finance portal interface requires serious tweakiing. Teenagers and hardcore geeks are not the usual kind of people that visit Finance portals. Elderly people who are not very computer savvy consitute the bulk of traffic on Finance websites. Heavy use of Flash or AJAX may just turn them off.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.