Google Finance launched

I always wondered how long it would take for Google to launch their own finance and now they did it. One of the reasons why I wondered is because when you enter stock names in Google you'll often get Yahoo Finance as the first result.

Well this changed today. Google now displays real-time stock information and links to it's Google Finance website along with other finance websites like Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and others.

It's still beta but it already offers a broad range of information about North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data.

Features:

Company Search — With Google Finance you can search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, using both company names and (where available) ticker symbols.

Interactive Charts — Google Finance charts correlate market data with corresponding dated news stories to help you determine if there is a relationship between them (for instance, by seeing news stories that came out about a certain company in the context of what that company's stock did that day). You can also click and drag the charts to see different time periods and zoom in to see more detailed information.

News and More News — Google Finance incorporates our Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Stories are clustered by topic so you can see different opinions on a single subject; you can also review news stories by monthly date range and by importance (which is determined by algorithms).

Blogs — If you want the opinions of citizen journalists, you got 'em; Google Finance includes company-related postings from Google Blog Search.

Company Management Team — Google Finance helps you put a face to a name. Mousing over an executive name shows you their picture as well as links, where available, to their biography, compensation details and trading activity.

Discussion Groups — Talk amongst yourselves. Google Finance offers high-quality Discussion Groups whose dedicated team of moderators work to keep conversations on and spam-free.

Portfolios — Google Finance offers a fast, easy and powerful way to keep create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.

You can check out this new site over at Google Finance. I just tested it and it looks quite interesting, on the left you see the stock price, you can drag the chart and Google automatically shows relevant news articles on the right that correspond with the selected date.