Google once claimed its stakes in the search wars as the site with the clean, uncluttered interface that challenged you to "Feel Lucky". With expansion into paid for search ads, a host of desktop software tools including Google Desktop and Google Earth, and new Web features like GMail, Blogger, the Google Toolbar, Google News, Froogle, Google Pages and more, one has the option to find nearly as much data on Google as one associates with more established portal sites - namely Yahoo!. Yet another wall falls down today with the debut of Google Finance. Rather than forge their own way with a "Moneygle" site or some other such nonsense, this page is ripped right from the Yahoo! playbook. With Yahoo! Finance having a significant headstart, Google Finance aims to offer stock charts, financial news, chat rooms and many of the familiar items we've come to expect from Yahoo! Finance and other similar sites on the Web.
I've used many of Yahoo!'s stock sites and functions with near-exclusivity for years, especially with the quasi-demise of the Excite@Home franchise. (I started with my.excite.com rather than my.yahoo.com) It should be interesting to see if Google can offer a superior service - one strong enough to push me to move over - but it better be worth the recreation of all my custom stock portfolios and news sources...
More reports on this announcement:
CNET: Google To Roll Out Its Own Finance Site
Forbes: Google Rolls Out Financial Site
San Jose Mercury News: Google Launches Financial Web Site
SearchEngineWatch: Google Launches Google Finance
Silicon Beat: Google Unleashes Google Finance