Finance Blog

Google Finance gets a fresh coat of paint

2011-11-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

Posted by Albert Choi, Consumer Experience Specialist and Karolina Netolicka, Product Manager

Over the last few months, you might have noticed that Google products have been getting a new look. And starting today, Google Finance is joining the party! This means that over the next few days, you’ll begin to see a new look in Finance that brings you a more consistent and seamless experience with the other Google products you use.

New Google Finance Company page

Our philosophy for the new look and feel has been to bring the most important information to the forefront so you get to the content you want faster. Here’s a short list of the current changes that we’ve made:

The stock quote is now more prominent
More results is now a large clickable button on the right side of the page
The Add to portfolio link has turned into an easy-to-find button next to the company name
+1 button to easily share and recommend companies and stocks you’re interested in

While the most recent changes focus on the visual design, keep your eyes peeled for improvements to the navigation and functionality of Google Finance in the near future. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the changes, feel free to voice your opinions on our feedback form. We’re always striving to improve your online experience, and your suggestions are really helpful in moving our product forward.

Cheers,
The Google Finance Team

Old Google Finance Markets page

New Google Finance Markets page

Happy Birthday Google Finance!

2011-03-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

Posted by Karolina Netolicka, Product Manager and Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations

Google Finance celebrates its fifth birthday today. We thought this would be a great opportunity to look back on the last five years and highlight some of the most exciting features we have launched.

Google Finance launched on March 21, 2006 with pricing data from the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Amex and Euronext. Our most innovative feature at the time was the now-familiar interactive chart that seamlessly scrolled, zoomed, and showed a timeline of news coverage for each company. Later that year we added the ability to track your investments in a portfolio.

New Features

In 2007 we added some major new ways to access Google Finance. We launched our first mobile application and iGoogle gadget. In addition, we added the GoogleFinance functions which allow you to easily incorporate financial information into your Google Spreadsheets.

In 2008 the big addition was the Stock Screener. In 2009 we added Google Domestic Trends, which uses search data to track the state of the US economy. Finally, last year we added options data and the ability to chart the performance of your portfolio.

Apart from these big launches, we’ve also made countless smaller improvements. Both charts and quotes now automatically update while you’re viewing the page. You can display technical indicators on the chart, view after-hours trading data, and expand the chart across the whole page. You can see information on related companies for all US public companies. And your portfolio now adjusts your holdings for splits and dividends.

Data Coverage

Over the years we have expanded our data coverage to 24 exchanges in 15 countries. More importantly, though, Google Finance has pushed for consumer access to free real-time quotes. In 2008 we were the site to launch real-time quotes for NYSE and NASDAQ
to non-logged-in users. Since then, we have upgraded all of our data in China and India to real-time.

Today, Google Finance continues to deliver timely financial data to users all over the world. Our users rely on us for our stability - Google Finance was one of the few services to stay up during the flash crash on May 6, 2010. As much as you rely on us, we also rely on you. Last year we launched a Product Ideas page, receiving over 5,000 feature ideas. This type of user engagement is what has allowed us to offer you the product we present today. Thank you all for a great five years, and here’s to many more ahead!

Then (2006):

Now (2011):

Getting Defined

2011-03-07T10:51:00.001-08:00

In July we asked you, our readers, what new features you wanted to see on Google Finance. We received and enthusiastic response with over 3,700 ideas and 38,000 votes. One of the top 10 requests with over 700 votes was a Dictionary function for key financial terms and ratios.

We’re happy to announce that we have launched this feature for the financial terms at the top of the company page. To see the definitions, go to a company page on Google Finance and hover your mouse over the financial ratios beside the stock price. You will see a pop-up tooltip for terms such as 52 week, Shares, Vol/ Avg and Div/yield.

To see other launches that have come from your feedback visit our Product Ideas blog post . If you’re curious to see all ideas that were submitted, take a look through Google Finance Product Ideas.

Welcome, Google Apps users!

2010-11-24T11:14:00.000-08:00

Posted by Karolina Netolicka, Product Manager

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Finance is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accounts.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration with Google Apps.

For those Finance users who have a Google Apps account, if your administrator has already transitioned your organization to the new infrastructure, you can now use Google Finance by signing in at google.com/finance with your existing Apps account.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly available services for Google Apps users.

Invest Smarter: Stay on top of the latest Trends

2010-11-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

Posted by Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations Associate

We all know that to invest wisely, you need to keep an eye on broad market and economics trends. But did you know that Google Finance can help you do that in the blink of an eye? Right on the Google Finance homepage, we have a box dedicated to real-time trends that can help you make investment decisions, or just satisfy your curiosity.

This section allows you to see which companies are the biggest movers across many categories, each on a separate tab. Stay informed of big changes in basic stock metrics like price change, market cap, and volume as well as the unique market insight gained from knowing which companies have seen the biggest increase and decrease in searches on Google.

Here’s a look at what the trends we we display and what they mean.

Popular: The stocks that people are searching for most on Google
Price: Top gainers and losers in terms of % price change vs. the prior day's official closing price
Mkt Cap:Top gainers and losers in terms of change in absolute market capitalization vs. the prior day's official closing market cap
Volume: The stocks with the highest trade volume

Note: Price, Market cap, and Volume exclude stocks with market caps less than $1 billion and stock prices lower than $1.

Happy Investing!

Show Me (All) the Money! Google Finance rolls entire portfolios into one chart

2010-11-04T13:34:00.001-07:00

Posted by Patrick Coskren, Software Engineer

Any investment advisor’s first tip to new investors is to look at their investment portfolio as a whole, rather than banking on individual stocks. So for most of us, the most important metric for our investments is how our portfolio performs, especially relative to broader markets.

To make it even easier to track your portfolios, today we launched Portfolio Charting on Google Finance. Now you can graphically track your portfolio’s historical performance either individually or versus a specific stock or market index to get an instant snapshot of how you’re doing. For the first time on Google Finance, you can see a visual representation of an entire portfolio as well as track it over time, rather than graphing each stock individually.

To get started, visit your Portfolio page and scroll down under ‘Portfolio related news’. From here you can see your portfolio’s total value over time or zoom to a specific date. Use the graph to compare your portfolio to indices like Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ, or enter a symbol to compare your portfolio to a particular stock.

The graph uses the transaction data you’ve entered or uploaded for your portfolios to display the market value of each portfolio at a given time. If you haven’t entered transaction information for a portfolio, we make some assumptions to give a general overview of the stocks you’ve selected. For a full breakdown of the assumptions we make, visit the Help Center.

Try this feature out and let us know what you think or submit your suggestions for Google Finance on our Product Ideas page. Stay tuned for more as we keep building out Google Finance and catch the latest from the Google Finance team by following us on Twitter.

Google Finance adds multiple sign-in

2010-10-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Google offers multiple sign-in, which allows you to use more than one Google Account in the same browser session for a limited set of Google products. Today we are pleased to announce that Google Finance has joined that group.

Gone are the days of switching between browsers to see your personal vs. professional financial portfolios, news, and charts. With multiple sign-in, you simply switch between accounts using the upper right hand navigation tool. The site will smoothly transition to your other account, allowing you to view other account portfolios in the click of a mouse.

To activate multiple sign-in, click on your username in the upper right hand corner of any Google page, including Finance. Click on “Google Account Settings” and you’ll be taken to your Google Profile page.

Then click on “Edit” next to the Multiple sign-in setting and you will be taken to a page which explains how multiple sign-in works and allows you to enable this feature for your account.

For more information on using multiple sign-in, visit the Help Center and suggest additional Google products for which you’d like to use multiple sign-in. As always, for the latest from the Google Finance team, follow us on Twitter.

Mobile Finance gets smarter, faster, better

2010-10-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

Posted by Philip Brittan, Director of Product Management

We first announced Google Finance for smartphones in August, bringing your latest portfolio quotes and market charts to your fingertips, even when you’re away from your desk. But what about mutual funds and portfolios? Today we’re pleased to announce a number of improvements to the mobile site that will make it easier -- and faster -- to get your key finance updates on the go.

Mutual Funds
Now in addition to seeing the latest stock and market index quotes on the mobile site, you can view mutual funds’ prices, performance and key statistics on your smartphone just by entering the ticker into the search box.

Big Charts in Landscape
Chances are your smartphone has a much bigger screen than prior phones you had, so take advantage of it. You can now view wider stock charts just by turning your phone on it’s side and looking in landscape view, as in the photo above.

Portfolio Performance
View more than just the last price and market cap for stocks in your portfolio; now you can see how your portfolio is performing right this minute, no matter where you are. Simply click the Performance tab from the Portfolio page to see the Market Value, Day’s Gain, and Overall performance of your custom Google Finance portfolio.

Speed
We all know the feeling. You’re on the run and using your smartphone for information you need right away...and the page takes forever to load. Well, we can’t help when the mobile networks get overloaded or you’re out of the 3G zone, but we are doing everything we can to help you get the information you need as fast as possible. We now cache the CSS and Javascript from pages on the mobile site so that reloads are faster than ever.

So hop on that smartphone of yours and start trying out the new features. And be sure to catch the latest from the Google Finance team on Twitter.

Share your Stock Screener Scenarios with the Google Finance Team

2010-09-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Here on the Google Finance team we love to use the Stock Screener tool to make investing decisions or have fun exploring the performance of various stocks across industries.

We’re starting a series on our blog and Twitter accounts promoting interesting screening scenarios and results, and we’d love your input. Here’s a few of our favorite examples so far:

To submit your own stock screener scenarios for the chance to be featured in our blog or Twitter stream, just start screening for your favorite real-life or fantasy stock decisions and submit the results to our dedicated group with a brief explanation - the more details you provide around why you chose to screen the way you did, what your reaction to the results was, and why you think it’s an interesting screen - the better! If you’d like more information on all the options the stock screener offers, take a look at our latest blog post.

As always, for the latest updates from the Google Finance team, just follow us on Twitter.

Product Ideas Submissions: Coming to a close

2010-09-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Posted by Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations

Here on the Google Finance team we are committed to adding valuable new features with every launch. Six weeks ago we launched a ‘Product Ideas page for Google Finance’ push in which we invited you to submit and vote on feature ideas for our site. During the series, over 5,000 of you submitted 3,700 ideas and 38,000 votes. Now, as the series is winding down, here’s a look at some of your top ideas and what we have implemented so far.

What you voted for:

Launched! New Mobile Interface: A new mobile interface was the top idea on the Product Ideas page before we launched it.

Launched! Big Charts : Bigger charts have always been a top feature request and since launching this feature in August it’s become one of our favorite tools.

Top Ideas
The top ideas are a mix of portfolio charting, data/market requests, and education tools. Although we don’t have these yet we’re always working on new ideas.

Portfolio Charting: "Show historical graph of portfolio, complete with dividends, splits, etc." "A chart to see how your earnings fluctuated in your portfolio's investments...”

Alerts: "Generate alerts based on stock, option, indices events. For e.g. change in volatility,"

Institutional and Insider Ownership: "Show % of outstanding stock held by institutional investors, and insider holdings/transactions."

Dictionary: "The ability to click on different financial terms (like p/e, market cap, etc) and get background on them"

Economic Indicators: “Add historical data for CPI, GDP, unemployment rate, etc. (Ability to compare graphically vs. the S&P500)"

You have a few more days before this series of Google Finance Product Ideas is closed, so jump in and vote now.

Thank you for all the valuable feedback and Ideas. Stay tuned as we implement your top ideas on Google Finance and catch the latest from the Google Finance team by following us on Twitter.

Revisiting Domestic Trends

2010-09-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

A couple weeks ago we showed you our best tips for the Google Finance Stock Screener. But this tool is just one of many features on the site that is designed to help you make informed investing decisions. Today we’d like to reintroduce you to Google’s Domestic Trends - a powerful tool for exploring the economy and financial markets.

We first introduced Google Domestic Trends last September in partnership with Hal Varian and the Google team of economists. The ultimate goal was to explore the link between relative search query volume of terms related each of 23 major economic industries in the United States and stock market performance. In this way, we sought to provide unique insight into the broader economy and help users to take a holistic view of the market.

The tool is easy to use - just select the industry you’re interested in to see a sample of the keywords we track for that industry. Then, compare searches for those terms with price performance of the major market indices or individual stocks. As a reminder, each index value is set to 1.0 as of January 1, 2005 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts.

To mark the anniversary of these tools, the Google Finance team decided to have some fun with the data to see what interesting trends we could find. Here are some of our favorites:

Luxury Goods

Over the past year, the luxury goods index has shown a predictable pattern with spikes in searches for terms related to jewelry, diamonds, and more around the winter holiday season and Valentine’s day. However, the comparison chart below shows that the traditional luxury goods stocks did not show huge spikes during those periods and instead followed the trend of the broader market index (in this example, the Dow Jones Index), including a continued trend upwards in spring of this year even as relative searches for luxury goods fell, with the exception of the Valentine’s day spike in February.

Automotive Index

Over the lifetime of the Domestic Trends Index, we’ve seen a regular spike in search traffic for automotive related queries each summer - regardless of broader market performance. In 2010, however, the spike was significantly smaller, as shown in the graph below.

The stock performance of most major automotive stocks for 2010, reflects this trend. With the marked exception of Ford Motor Company, which is up nearly 19.7% as of September 14, and Tata Motors which is up 40.8% for the year, other major automotive stocks are all down for 2010.

Explore Domestic Trends to discover more interesting trends and indicators for the economy and markets. And to catch the latest from the Google Finance team, follow us on Twitter.

Quotes pages: Not just for Stocks!

2010-09-08T07:39:00.000-07:00

Posted by Philip Brittan, Director of Product Management

Around Google Finance, stock pages get a lot of attention, and with good reason. With all those highly customizable charts, news flags, and key company statistics, we’re big fans of them too.

But everyone knows individual stocks alone do not a successful portfolio make. That’s where mutual funds come in. These bundles of investment securities are one of the most popular investment tools around, and that’s why at Google Finance we put a lot of effort into our mutual funds coverage as well. But in case you’ve been distracted by the glitz and glamor of the individual stock pages, here’s a quick rundown of mutual funds on Google Finance.

To view mutual fund pages, simply search for the fund’s symbol in the Google Finance search box in the same way you’d look for an individual security. You’ll notice that these pages look significantly different from individual securities pages.

The mutual fund page is full of relevant research information, including trailing returns, investment requirements, and historical prices. Get a description of the investment funds’ main goals and of the fund managers. Access Morningstar ratings, statistics information, style and risk metrics, right on the fund’s main page.

To see the key statistics, major holdings, and asset allocations of the mutual fund, simply scroll down. You can even link to the individual securities pages on Google Finance for each of the top 10 holdings in any mutual fund.

Once you’ve selected the perfect mutual fund for your investment portfolio, find listings for brokerages that sell the fund by clicking on Purchase Information.

You can then add mutual funds to your Google Finance portfolio to watch them and include your transaction information for individual funds for easy and comprehensive portfolio tracking. Whether your strategy is to invest in small growth funds, large value funds, or any mix of value propositions, Google Finance can help you research, select, and track them. If you have any questions or comments, as always, fee free to reach us on our Twitter account.

Stay keen and start to Screen

2010-09-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

The Google Finance Stock Screener is one of the most powerful tools for financial research on the site. Save yourself some research time by letting the Stock Screener tell you exactly what you want! The Google Finance team has been listening to your feedback on Product Ideas, and we see a strong interest in this feature so we want to share our best practices for getting the most out of this tool.

The Stock Screener allows you to sort using a wide range of criteria - including a number of options you may not be familiar with yet. So even if you already use it, keep reading to learn new tips and tricks.

Getting Started

The Stock Screener can be accessed in two ways:

From the left hand navigation bar on the homepage, or
From a company page. Scroll down to ‘Key stats and ratios’ along the right hand side and click the ‘Screen stocks with similar metrics’ link. This will automatically fetch companies with similar P/E Ratios and Returns on Equity (TTM) (%)

So how specific can one really get?!... VERY

First, you can specify by the Exchange and/or Sector that you want, before narrowing down the financial metrics.

Don’t be afraid to ‘Add criteria’

Why stop at Market cap or P/E Ratio? The Google Finance Stock Screener is a comprehensive tool that lets you add valuation ratios, operating metrics, margins and many more. Simply click and choose from a variety of metrics including operating and stock metrics, price, margins, and growth. You can set a minimum and maximum for each metric or use the sliders to set your range. The Company Distribution shows you the relative frequency of stocks for the criterion but please note that this graph is a visual aid, not an analytic tool.

What about dividends? Perhaps you’re looking for a company that will only return a dividend next quarter. Select Div next quarter and the Screener will let you select a forecast value of the next quarterly dividend, per share, to be paid.

If you’re not sure what some of the criteria are, just click on them and a definition will appear in the Add Criteria wizard, as well as a help icon next to each line. And remember the search is live -- no buttons to press. As you make changes to your Screener criteria, the companies will update automatically!

Try these tips out and let us know what you think or submit your Stock Screener suggestions on our Product Ideas page. Stay tuned for more as we keep adding new features to Google Finance. To catch the latest from the Google Finance team you can follow us on Twitter.

Bigger, better Google Finance charts -- and how to get the most out of them

2010-08-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Posted by Tianpeng Jin, Software Engineer

One of the most popular features on Google Finance is our charts. In fact, we like them so much we thought they’d benefit from being bigger. So today we launched a new feature on our individual stock and market charts: the ability to expand them to fill the page and allow for further refinement.

Here are our top tips & tricks for using Google Finance charts, including a few longstanding ones you may not have seen before.

1) Big charts (NEW)

To expand a stock chart, click the arrow button in the upper-right corner. Voilà! The chart fills the page, making it easier than ever to see and manipulate. If you want to collapse it, just click the arrow button again.

Before:

After:

2) Customize your chart view in ‘Settings’

You can change the content of the charts to include or exclude news flags, dividends, splits, volume, and after hours trading data by clicking on the ‘Settings’ tab under the chart. From this panel, you can also change the scale from linear to logarithmic and change the default zoom for your charts. Also on the Settings tab, you can switch your charts to a variety of types. Instead of a line graph, you can opt to view candlestick or OHLC (Open, High, Low, Close) charts.

3) Plot custom news feeds on your charts

Using the ‘Plot Feeds’ tab, you can customize the news annotations on your chart to come from a favorite RSS feed or news source. Simply click the tab, enter the Feed Address, and click Plot Feeds. Here you can see I’m tracking The Apple Blog.

4) Let’s get technical

The ‘Technicals' tab allows you to add a variety of technical data to your charts for more advanced tracking. Available technicals range from Simple and Exponential Moving Averages to KDJ Indicators and Bollinger Bands, among many more. You can set up as many technical data series’ to your charts as you like and view up to six at a time.

Try these tips out and let us know what you think or submit your suggestions for Google Finance on our Product Ideas page. Stay tuned for more as we keep building out Google Finance.

Google Finance smartens up for your smartphone

2010-08-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Here on the Google Finance team, we’re always looking for new ways to help you access the finance data, charts, and reports that you need in the blink of an eye. But all the data in the world won’t help if you can’t access it when you need it most. Since many of us are on the run throughout the day and don’t always have our computers in front of us, it came as no surprise that one of users’ most frequently requested features was a fast, easy-to-use mobile website for Google Finance.

We heard your feedback and are please to announce we’ve launched the new Android/iPhone edition of Google Finance for mobile! The markets don’t stop when you leave your desk, so we’re bringing the markets to you. Our new design gives you a unified experience across desktop and Android or iPhone phones, offering nearly all the same features and functionality on both. You can easily access the new site when you do a Google search for stock tickers or company names on your mobile device, or when you tap the "Finance" tab on the Google mobile homepage.

Now no matter where you are, you can keep up with your portfolio, the latest market news, and the sectors you care about, with real time quotes and data -- all at a glance.

Prefer it in app form? Android users can also get the Google Finance app in Android Market.

As always, if you have feedback on this or other topics, please share it on our Google Finance survey or visit our Product Ideas site where you can share and vote on ideas.

For more tips and tricks on Google Finance, follow us on Twitter.

What do you wish Google Finance could do?

2010-08-13T11:16:00.001-07:00

Posted by Laura Hughes, Consumer Operations
Have you ever had an idea for Google Finance? We want to hear it! Today we’re opening up our very own Product Ideas page.

The Google Finance team looks to our users for feedback and ideas. Knowing what you care about helps us set our priorities when we’re developing the product. Our Product Ideas page lets you submit, vote on, and read other ideas from users. Best of all, it allows the team to jump in and see what YOU want. We’ll respond directly to the ideas that you’re most excited about.

So, don’t hesitate -- tell us what you think would make your Google Finance experience more efficient and more exciting. Take a look at some of the most voted Ideas now and submit your own.

For further feedback visit our product survey here. Stay tuned for more as we keep building out Google Finance and catch the latest from the Google Finance team by following us on Twitter.

Google Finance adds oodles of options

2010-07-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

Posted by Philip Brittan, Director of Product Management

Buy! Sell! Hold! That’s stock trading 101. But sometimes investing isn’t as simple as just buying or selling shares of a stock or mutual funds. More sophisticated stock watchers also want to have the choice, but not the obligation, to purchase or sell a security before a certain time and for a specific amount of money. Yes, it’s nice to have options...

In fact, according to the feedback we’ve collected in our Help Center, options data is among the most requested features users ask for each month. So we’re making options information available to all Google Finance users globally. To find options data on a specific company, search for the company’s name on http://www.google.com/finance. You’ll see a new link to the Option chain in the left navigation bar, which will display the complete option chain for the closest expiration month from today. You can change the expiration date by choosing from the ‘View options by expiration’ dropdown. Here’s a sample option chain for Cisco Systems with an expiration of July 17, 2010:

If you’d prefer to see just the Calls or Puts for the company selected, click on the ‘+’ or ‘-’ beside the table. You can also view the tables straddled side by side. For more information on understanding option chain data, visit our Help Center

We hope you find option chain data helpful as you use Google Finance. If you’ve got feedback on this or other topics, please share it on our survey or visit Product Ideas where you can share and vote on ideas.

For more tips and tricks on Google Finance follow us on Twitter.

Improved Company Comparisons

2009-10-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

Posted by Tianpeng Jin, Software Engineer

Now there is a faster and easier to use company comparison page on Google Finance! Many of you query multiple companies at the same time, so we have worked to make the results better. Let us take a look at this comparison of HP & DELL.

First, the comparison chart displays price changes for all the companies you include. Next to the chart, you will see news related to all of those companies. You can navigate the chart, zoom in and out, and click on news stories just as you can on the chart on a regular stock page.

You will find a table of key metrics such as price or market cap right below the chart, and can customize the metrics by adding or removing columns from the table. Your configuration will be saved and applied to future comparisons as your personal setting.

You can also add more companies to the page. Enter the ticker in the input box above the price chart and click! You will find the new company's price, news and table metrics have been added.

Last but not least, Google Finance now supports cross-country stock comparison. Compare any public stocks from across the world. For example, you can compare Apple with HTC Corporation.

Google Search Volumes and Economic Activity

2009-09-03T15:38:00.001-07:00

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager and Eric Schrock, Software Engineer

We are really excited to launch Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This launch was inspired by Hal Varian, our chief economist's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic indicators.

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts.

For example, the Google Unemployment Index tracks queries like [unemployment], [social security], [unemployment benefits] and so forth. We see that as the recession took hold in the latter half of 2008, this index increased quite dramatically.

Predicting real-world statistics
We wondered if Google search volumes in a month can help better predict real world statistics well before they are officially tabulated and released.

Predicting retail sales
The US Census Bureau releases the Advance Monthly Retail Sales survey 1–2 weeks after the close of each month. These figures are based on a mail survey from a number of retail establishments and are thought to be useful leading indicators of macroeconomic performance. Learn more about the survey and the procedures followed in constructing these numbers.

The retail sales data is organized according to the NAICS retail trade categories. The data is reported in both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted form; for the analysis in this section, we use only the unadjusted data for the NAICS category 448 (clothing and clothing accessories stores).

Google Domestic Trends data
The Google Retail Index tracks query volumes on Google.com related to the retail trade category. Sample queries are [retail], [bags], [retail sales] and so forth. For this analysis we use the index value (30 day moving average) in the middle of the month. Thus, to predict retail sales of March, 2008 we use the index value on March 15th, 2008.

We observe that the Mean Absolute Error improves from 6.52% to 3.65% (an improvement of 44%)!

You can read more about Hal's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic activities on the Google Research Blog.

The data for these indexes are available for download — so you can use it with your own models. If you find interesting patterns and uses, feel free to share with us!

Splits and dividends now tracked in portfolios

2009-08-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

Posted by Patrick Coskren, Software Engineer

One of our most frequent user requests is that portfolios automatically account for splits and dividends. Starting today, they do. Transaction view lists all splits and dividends during the time period when you hold a stock. When a stock splits, your quantity is automatically adjusted in Performance view. Dividends are automatically deposited into your cash holdings.

An example will help here: suppose you purchased 100 shares of GE on Dec 31, 1999, at a price of $51.53. When it split 3:1 on May 8, 2000, you'd have found yourself holding 300 shares. Google Finance portfolios will now accurately reflect the split, showing your purchase of 100 shares in Transactions view, but accurately reporting your current holdings as 300 shares in Performance view. At the same time, your cash value will now be $2,459.69, thanks to all the dividends GE has since your purchase.

For those of you who have been monitoring your stock performance, we know that you have manually adjusted your shares. We have ensured that we do not split-adjust your split-adjusted shares. Users' transactions that have a fully specified set of date, shares and purchase price will be back-adjusted to account for subsequent splits.

For more information, see our help center, and as always we invite feedback at the comments link below. Happy splitting!

Streaming charts and other updates this week

2009-07-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

Posted by Dion Loy, Software Engineer

A number of small features and fixes have been rolled out to everyone:

Streaming charts. We have had streaming real-time prices for quite some time, and now the charts have caught up to the rest of the page. The price plotted will updated as new prices are streamed into your browser. This should be useful for keeping an eye on earnings reports this month, especially in extended hours trading!

A toggle has been added to the top of the recent quotes module to select the absolute change or percentage change. You could actually toggle the selection before the header was introduced, by clicking on the change price/percentage itself, but this makes it more discoverable.

Bug fixes for Opera users on portfolios, and some IE users on index pages.

Watch this space for more updates as we roll out new features on Google Finance.

A Brand New Look and Feel for Google Finance!

2009-07-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-03T15:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-17T15:38:00.001-08:00

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.