Jeremy’s post on Google Finance vs. Yahoo! Finance seems to have generated some good discussion, but people seemed to have exaggerated the battle. With Henry Blodget calling Jeremy’s post a “depressing take”. All of a sudden a call for improvements is interpreted as “yes, we suck” statement. All of a sudden Google Finance is the gift from up above, while Yahoo! Finance is a useless Web 1.0 app used only by people who don’t know any better.
But come on! Even before working at Yahoo!, the finance.yahoo.com property struck me as information goldmine. Finance has been around almost foreever, yet every time I am doing some financial research I come across some features that I haven’t seen before. I blogged about company-specific RSS feeds and upcoming IPOs list. There’s also stuff like 2005 tax law changes, historical prices and historical dividends, analyst opinion overviews and tons of other stuff.
Admittedly, the stock charts don’t offer too many options, as cookie-cutter timespans are rarely useful to a serious investor. However, I don’t buy the Flash-enabled charts. High on the coolness factor, they are rarely useful, when you need to use the picture on your Web site or paste it into e-mail to your financial advisor, nothing beats a simple GIF. Addition of the blogs to the financial coverage doesn’t seem that useful to me either. Blogs are great for covering stuff like new gadgets, latest political developments and Tom Cruise’s visits, but when I research my financial decisions, I don’t want to read some random opinions from people who might have some personal agendas. If anything, allow me to choose blogs that I want to include, like Stalwart and others. Blogs who have coverage on MSFT, GOOG, WMT or HAL always seem to have more noise than signal anyway. Yahoo! Finance might be considered lacking on the interface part, but it’s lacking as much as Craigslist lacks pretty colors. And guess what - those of us who have been Finance users for many years are used to it and are efficient in using it.
Google Finance is important for Google, as approximately one-fifth of all the Internet ad money goes towards financial sites, since people will always be looking for ideas to invest in, current tax rate and tax savings tips as well as loans and credit cards. Plus getting into the top ten finance sites is not that hard - just generate more than a million visitors a week and kick Bankrate out of #10 spot.