Finance information on Google | Hacker News Reader

Finance information on Google

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108 pointsgyanchawdhary74 comments

They just proved that Google never forgets anything, even when you do your best to remove/delete/erase/destroy your personal information.

I thoroughly and repeatedly deleted all stock-related information from my Google account: all portfolios removed, all search history erased, all past Google Now topics suppressed, past emails deleted, Google chat conversations removed. Just everything (and I know really well how to control data on a Google account, I was once a Google fanboy and explored every little feature I could get my hand on, so customizing my Google account/products settings is something I'm quite good at).

Guess what? Going to their new google.com/finance brought all the stocks I've once added to Google Finance and removed. More than a dozen of stock tickers were automatically added to my account, and listed as "following".

It's impossible for me to completely delete my Google account because of some work-related obligations, but Google just proved that it will NEVER allow you to get forgotten.

We're forced to feed a beast we can no longer escape.

PS: the only Google things I occasionally use now are Gmail & Google Contacts (planning to switch to ProtonMail, but waiting for a contact syncing service on Android) and search (when Qwant isn't good enough).

Google "my stocks" and click the star to unfollow them.

Of course I promptly did that. The things is that I already unfollowed everything in the past. More importantly, I asked Google to remove everything multiple times.

This Whac-A-Mole is not a game, and that will not end well.

I once tried blocking all Google domains from my hosts file. Every domain they own set to 0.0.0.0. It was fascinating to see how sites break because of this. The most annoying were logins and registrations failing because of recaptcha. And also embedded maps not being displayed, incorrect fonts, and sites just showing a blank white page when failing to render. That being said there was an noticeable boost in speed for most sites.

Google forgets. I cannot find any of my social media stuff from 15 years ago. There weren't many walled gardens back then. Everything was open to indexing and yet it no longer seems to exist.

That’s not what OP was talking about. OP is talking about the reemergence of personal Google data he/she deleted, not a de-indexed search result for a website that is offline.

The fact that you can no longer publicly access the information is not proof that Google lost the data.

In other contexts "Google does not forget" means what can be found through web search, but here the grandparent was using a broader meaning, closer to "once shared, data is no longer yours".

Google Now had a separate list of stocks it would show you alerts for that differed from Google Finance. There was a way to manage that stock list from with Now. Maybe the new Finance UI pulled stocks from that?

This is old, but shows the Now setting for stocks[0].

[0] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/41357/how-do-i-r...

All these entries were deleted. I repeatedly reset the Google Now entries and settings.

Weird. I'm having the exact opposite experience. There's literally one quote a care about because it's the only stock I currently own. And it's nowhere to be seen on that page.

Either way, anecdotal cases like this don't really support or refute your claim.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

A long time ago, it was possible to remove Google products and services on a case by case basis.

There were public URL from which you could request the deletion of your data. You could find it at http://ruscoe.net/google/google-account-service-names/ ("Google Account Service Names" link, which now redirects to some notice about the blogger's life). The list was crowdsourced by Blogoscoped's members and maintained by Tony Ruscoe (who made the list unaccessible right after being hired by Google).

You can find some in these "EditUserServiceData" URLs on this post: http://blog.ruscoe.net/2006/06/google-rs2-ssd-and-mobile-dow...

Times have changed a lot (for the worst) since 2008...

> Google Finance is under renovation. As a part of this process, the Portfolios feature won't be available after mid-November 2017. To keep a copy, download your portfolio.

Epic. Fail.

EDIT: also, new new version looks terrible! it's first stop on the way to obsolescence and graveyard

Pretty much. Have you tried https://wallmine.com/google-finance-portfolio-alternative?

Edit: disclosure - I am affiliated with the recommended site.

Are you the author? You've submitted that page three times in two days.

He probably is. That said, you might also want to take a look at Stockfolio then: https://stockfolioapp.com.

Full disclosure: I'm the author. Also, we're pushing a major update sometime next week.

Why Mac only? :(

This sort of app can easily be on the web, at least.

How can you tell? I only see one comment in her profile and I have showdead enabled.

I'm not surprised they've been deleted if she's spamming like this but curious if you just recognized the username or if there's another setting I need to enable to see those comments.

I'm not sure GP's claim is true. HN search shows one "Show HN" post and two comments with that website as links, all submitted by different usernames. I don't think this is an inappropriate level of promotion.

The history you see is all there's ever been.

So what? Does it hurt you in some way? I don't see the issue with people advertising their projects when the opportunity arises. This is HN, the home of software hustlers, ya' know.

I agree. A shameless plug in a relevant thread is actually helpful to people.

OK, but developers should still disclose their affiliation.

It's fine as long as it's clear that the author is talking about his/her own creation.

Sorry, I didn't want to move the discussion in that direction. The recent 'Show HN' of the page was a different user (I assume author, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758440). So I was wondering if the other account is a co-author/employee/second account of the same user because "hey, author here" comments often lead to good insight, e.g. features, comparison. Shameless plug is fine, it's a highly relevant service now that Google removed features.

Thank you (and others) for pointing out that affiliation should always be spelled out. I'm very sorry for unintentionally causing such a stir but grateful for the learning lesson. I'm part of the team working on the site and will make sure to make that clear in the future. Thank you!

Are you planning on supporting european stock markets?

Yes, support for European stock markets is part of the development plan, but it will take some time until it's fully available.

It reads like,

> find someone who has this as a serious business, we will abandon this service eventually

I know that they will probably kill it like they do all of their useful products, but it seems like this could turn a profit for Google. A moderately trained monkey should be able to turn a profit either by selling people's financial search information or by investing based on their searches (although I'm not entirely sure that would be legal).

What investor wouldn't pay for a real time stream of search volume for each ticker?

Right but Google doesn't do the former (sell user info), and the latter no big company will touch with a 10' pole once anyone in legal gets wind of it.

Google wouldn't be selling individual user searches, just something like "TSLA has had 52 queries in the last second." Nobody's privacy is violated there. Google already reports historical search trends, so it is plausible that they could make a real-time version to sell. They could charge by the number of symbols you subscribe to, or by the frequency you desire.

It looks more like an interface change, like what happened with hotel room finding where they rolled it into regular search.

Search is core to Google and it's not like people are going to stop searching for info about stocks, so it makes sense to use that UI and avoid having separate web apps where possible.

I'm curious; where you using this feature? Why was Google Finance better than the alternatives? I've kept an eye on Google Finance for a while and it doesn't appear to have received any updates for a long time. The stock chart still requires Flash, for example.

tradingview is pretty great for charts. Although doesn't have the news component, i guess.

Bottom right-hand corner of every chart has a "headlines" window. Might not be amazing but it is there.

My memory may be faulty, but I think google finance had real time quotes when yahoo and most everybody else had a 15-minute delay.

Nope, 15 minute delay like almost everyone else.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-stock-market-data-delayed-by-20...

No, Google had real-time data (as they had an info message confirming that displayed on most tickers). Someone in your link also comments on that.

My apologies: turns out the delay is only in Canada for TSE listed stocks and does not apply to US exchanges such as NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.

I remember when Google product announcements meant you’d get blown away by something unexpectedly better than everything else. Now we have this.

If you're investing why wouldn't you just use your investment company's tools?

I've used several and they're all far superior to Google Finance. I use google just for quick lookups.

Because, at best, that's vendor lock-in and alternatives are always appreciated (especially if free).

> As part of this revamped experience, we’re retiring a few features of the original Google Finance, including the portfolio

So they're basically making it useless.

Also, while the charts no longer require Flash, they no longer support arbitrary date ranges. So they're useless too now.

Also, I find it very disappointing that they removed portfolios and portfolio downloads without telling anybody in advance so that they could download their portfolios beforehand. (Edit: apparently https://finance.google.com/ is still available separately, for a short time)

finance.google.com has had a big yellow notice on top for at least 3 months, if not longer. If you haven't noticed before, you weren't a user.

Yeah, I saw that on the portfolio page. Since about July I've been looking mostly at the portfolio on the homepage, so I missed it.

I've been complaining about Finance for years but they never listen. At one point the charts work OK then they replaced them with flash which I refused to allow on my Mac. The stock screener was always a broken waste of time. Often their data was months behind when it came to updating or retiring symbols. At one point it showed a retired symbol for month. The categories seemed almost hopeless to get any real info out of. They should either make it google class or eliminate it entirely.

Portfolio is the only thing I wanted. Lots of other sites offer stock charts and news. :(

The previous portfolio did suck bad, but they could easily have improved it. Major missed opportunity.

"As part of this revamped experience, we’re retiring a few features of the original Google Finance, including the portfolio, the ability to download your portfolio, and historical tables"

Removing this sucks...

I can still use Google Sheets... hopefully they won't kill that too

As part of this revampired experience, we're retiring a few non-essential features of the original Google Sheets, including "Editing Cells", "Scrolling" and "All Math Functions".

I hope they expose the API. There are very few good API's in finance, Yahoo's was great until they deprecated it.

You mean free APIs. Of course there are good API's in finance if you are willing to pay.

It would be fantastic if they did this, really don't see why they don't unless they are buying their data from someone else in which case they will have limits on how they can reuse that data.

Been a cofounder of a finance startup and working with any of the major data providers in finance is a complete nightmare. You are paying exorbitant fees, for what is essentially public information, which is delivered through the most antiquated methods, and then you still have to spend a week writing various parsers just so that you can convert that data in to something usable.

I never knew how messy the data was until I had to be the one writing those parsers and it is a huge mess.

> It would be fantastic if they did this, really don't see why they don't

Google really doesn't do open APIs anymore. Every new product is without an open API and they've been slowly deprecating and removing APIs from old products. I guess they wanna be like Apple.

I know. When I started looking for a side project, all I see is high priced API's from no-name companies. Not sure if I want to base my prediction on these data sets.

If clean data and easy access is a priority and you are willing to pay money, the gold standard is CRSP [1]. Full disclosure - I work there.

[1] http://www.crsp.com/

Just to clarify: CRSP is great but not the gold standard. A lot of big comapnies use services from Xignite,CaptialIQ and ICE Data.

>"You are paying exorbitant fees, for what is essentially public information"

I don't understand how this works. Is it really public information or the different markets sell it? Where are the providers getting the information in the first place?

I've long used the portfolio tool, and it is sufficient for my needs. I like that it is separate from my investment company's tool in part because it separates portfolio tracking from trading.

Can anyone recommend a comparable portfolio tracker where I can simply upload the .ofx file I've downloaded from Google Finance and get a comparable experience?

Google, I'm bummed that the portfolio service is ending, as it has been extremely useful for more than half a decade for me, but thank you for providing it for free for as long as you have.

Why can't they just create your profile from reading your GMail? Or even better, from just reading the framebuffer of your Android device or Chrome browser?

Or from when you visit your financial institution's website using Chrome

Is there an actual link to the site? Going to google.com/finance doesn't give me the same thing as they show in the demo.

The text implies there is a way to try out the new one, but I have yet to successfully decode the meaning of their words.

"You can find this new experience by clicking "more" after conducting a search on Google for finance-related information or "Market summary" in the finance section of Search. For those who visit google.com/finance, you’ll see this new experience as well."

The completion isn't great. If I type "MA" it suggests Macy's, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (an Indian car maker), and MannKind Corporation (a biotech company with 2MM revenue last quarter). It does not, however, suggest MasterCard, whose ticker on NYSE is "MA"...

For me MasterCard is the first result. Maybe they just fixed it: https://imgur.com/sSWqxG6

That's the old Google Finance, which behaves as in your screenshot for me, too. This is what it looks like for me in the new version: https://i.imgur.com/BO5gY3B.png

Is this live yet? Tried on .co.uk and .com and I can't see the tab under "More".

Doesn't seem to be for me either. Either way, this has been long over due. Glad to see improvements are being attempted

Don't like this part at all... "As part of this revamped experience, we’re retiring a few features of the original Google Finance, including the portfolio, the ability to download your portfolio, and historical tables"

On mobile at least (haven’t tested on desktop), they only show quarterly financials, which, for value investing, are the least useful numbers for decision making.

Has no one else noticed that horrendously choppy gif? How is that supposed to persuade me to use the new Google Finance?

"Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts."

That's the old version (and perhaps part of the reason there is a new version).

guess its not live yet.

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