As submitted by NewRulesofInvesting:
This is a side to side comparison of two of the best online financial sites: Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. Yahoo is still the largest and most popular finance site by far but Google is serious about finance. Let’s see how the two financial portals stack up against each other.
Speed
Google Finance: Typical fast-loading Google pages. Google’s site is broad and doesn’t go deep. Pages for individual stocks are only 1 page deep (Google links out for things like option chains, major holder, etc.)
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is fast. As opposed to Google, Yahoo content resides primarily on Yahoo pages and Yahoo is responsible for page load speed throughout the site. This can fluctuate as any large website can throughout the day.
Charting
Google Finance: Google primarily uses a simple javascript-loaded chart without any bling. It loads fast and allows easy to manipulate x-axis (time period). When you’re figuring out what a particular stocks has done over the past 17 days, the chart also calculates the return for a given time frame beyond the standard 1-day, 5-day, 3 month, etc. time period. Google also plots news events onto their charts which is kind of cool (not necessarily tradeable).
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance charts are much more robust. Advanced charts have incorporated a similar charting function like Google’s and provides an overlay of numerous technical indicators (MACD, RSI). Because these charts are so powerful, they also tend to be bulky and seize up.
Real Time Quotes
Google Finance: Google provides real time quotes both during market hours and pre- and post- market. Google’s quotes on market indices tend to skew erratically during the transition to an open market as well as trails when the market makes large moves to the upside or downside.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo also provides real time quotes both during market hours and off. Yahoo’s premarket quotes are not as reliable as Google’s. Yahoo occasionally doesn’t have a price premarket for a wide array of stocks. Yahoo has a scrolling ticker as well for stocks that is personalized to the behavior of the user.
Breadth
Google Finance: Google gives basic info all on one page. Anything more a user needs to link off. News, financial info, blogs all included. Very shallow, quick and dirty use. Google does a good job bringing in blog content but lacks good, standardized PR content, still necessary in the research process.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo provides an entire research environment. All the content and data is supplied by Yahoo. From major holders to options chains to blogs and PR, Yahoo is a virtual poor man’s Bloomberg.
Innovation
Google Finance: Google allows users to download data, making the site more portable than we’ve traditionally seen. Google portrays the data environment well around a stock. Beyond that, nothing particularly innovative about what Google’s done so far.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is the 800lb gorilla and essentially helped to democratize financial information. Yahoo has done a good job bringing in financial blogs in a controlled environment, using SeekingAlpha to help filter. Charts are very powerful. Not too much current innovation going on either on the surface.
InformationWeek’s Stephen Wellman is a smart guy. I like his stuff — I really do.
As editor of InformationWeek’s Over the Air blog, Stephen has covered the iPhone and rumor-mill surrounding Google’s phone launch with professionalism, insight, and good scoop.
But he’s got a bone to pick with Google (GOOG).
Not necessarily with Google, the Company — he’s set his sights on Google, the Search Engine which powers Google, the Company.
Stephen asserts that Google Search is assailable by the throngs of vertical and niche search engines sprouting up all over the web. His assertion, that big General Search Engine, Google, will face competition, not from Yahoo or Microsoft, but by the numerous Technorati-esque niche providers who can perform their niche better than Google can perform in certain niches.
While I agree that from a functionality standpoint — yes, Technorati may perform better blog search than Google — these smaller search engines may provide better results for a certain task, but that doesn’t mean Google’s business is assailable.
That’s the equivalent of saying that since Segway’s self-balancing mechanism is so much better than other transportation technology out there, Segway is poised to eat the Auto Industry’s lunch. OK, this assertion was made by Dean Kamen when he was building up to launch of the device, but reality has set in. It’s a great device to use instead of a bike or a scooter or walking, but it’s not ready to replace my Honda just yet and certainly not poised to revolutionize urban transportation (ever hear of the subway or city bus??).
It no longer makes sense to view Google as just a search engine. Google, the Company, is more than just a search engine for the following 4 reasons:
1) Google as Web User Interface: Remember back when everything was portals? I used my ISP to dial-in to the Internet and was dropped off into an environment designed by the ISP with numerous outbound links to begin my surfing. Now, I only use Google (OK, I use iGoogle which is stickier given that fact that I’ve taken the time to personalize it). The revolution that Google kicked off was that I now view Google as my interface to the web. I go to my search engine to surf — not a portal. This is something that Technorati and the hordes of smaller engines can never provide me. I’m locked-in.
2) Suite of properties: As we’ve seen Google evolve from just a search engine into a more Yah00-like web experience, we’ve gotten hooked on various Google properties as part of an overarching web experience. I don’t really care that Gmail isn’t making serious money on Gmail — I love it. I use it not only for my web mail but I route some of my business email through it for spam detection and even for better indexing (admit it, some of you do this as well). I’m also using Google Apps to manage email from some of the blogs I manage. With Google Desktop, the boundaries between my PC (actually, it’s a mac baby!) and the internet have blurred and I use Google to search them both. This is incredible lock-in and not something a niche search provider can provide me or will usurp from Google.
3) Buy vs. Build to Compete: Even if these niche providers have better technology for vertical search, Google is competing on every front. Google Coop is an emerging platform that allows users to tweak search results, refine searches, and create their own search engines on Google technologies. It’s been slow but I’ve played around with this and with Google’s API, this thing is set for future bling-dom. Also, Google can always purchase some of the smaller players if the technology is really that outperforming.
4) SEARCH vs. search: I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I like using Google for everything. It’s actually great to give them all my business because in return I get adequate results for most everything I search for on and off the Internet AND it’s integrated into other apps that I’m running (Google Docs, Gmail for instance).
So, I guess Stephen is right and he isn’t right (my kids try to convince me that the same is true of me). There will always be startup companies developing cutting-edge search to compete against Google not head-on, but in verticals and niches in which they can compete. But, ultimately, Google wins.
Checkmate.
Disclosure: Author owns Google personally but his fund does not as of 8/13/2007.
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Zack Miller is the lead equity analyst for America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. For more information, go to www.israelnewsletter.com or call 1-888-327-6179, or email zack@profile-financial.com
