Google Launches Beta Finance Site

Now Google's playing the market: check out Google Finance, a new beta service which combined financial news, stock quotes, and targeted searches.

Internet heavyweight Google has decided to enter the arena of financial and investment information services, today launches a public beta of Google Finance. Although as yet less comprehensive than competing financial information services offered by rivals like Microsoft. AOL, yahoo, and TheStreet.com, Google clearly hopes to gain and edge by combining services and information in new ways, while adding just a splash of that special Google technological and branding mojo.

Google Finance purports to offer a broad range of information about North American stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, combined with charts, market data, and news. Google Finance offers the usual spate of symbol lookups and price charts, but puts some interesting spins on them. For instance, interactive charts bring together dated market data with news stories so relationships between news and stock prices are more apparent: as you zoom through time, the displayed news stories change with the date. Google Finance also integrates with Google News to cluster stories by topic, date range, and computed importance