Today Google Finance is celebrating its fifth birthday. It started of on March 21, 2006 with pricing data from the NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange, Amex and Euronext. Their most innovative feature at that time was the interactive chart, which we are quite familiar with now a days, that seamlessly scrolled, zoomed, and showed a timeline of news coverage for each company. Later that year they added the ability to track investments in a portfolio.
In 2007 Google launched their first mobile application and iGoogle gadget. To add to it, they added the GoogleFinance functions which allow easily incorporation of financial information into a 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.
Over the years Google expanded their 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, they were the site to launch real-time quotes for NYSE and NASDAQ to non-logged-in users. Since then, they have upgraded all their data in China and India to real-time.
Today, Google Finance continues to deliver timely financial data to users all over the world. Stability is a big plus for Google Finance, it was one of the few services to stay up during the flash crash in March 2010.
Wish the Google Finance team a big cheerios!
