Google Finance Finally Updated
google.com
google.com
Google Finance used to have all these features. They were already implemented and working fine in 2009! The original chart tool was much better than the current version. You could see every dividend that was issued, splits, add moving averages, etc. Then they "simplified" it by removing all the best features and are now adding them back?
Why would I bother to use this when they have so thoroughly torched their goodwill by senselessly killing off working (and good!) products?
Remember the "Briefcase" sync feature of windows 95... Now compare that to Dropbox syncing... Pretty much the same thing 25 years on. Different UI, same principle.
Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined their keyboard when they went to Windows Phone 10 or 8.1 I can't remember, and I've been searching for perfection ever since. GBoard, with it's fucking emoji page is an affront to engineering.
When Microsoft does things like this, and it's not clearly a dumb product decision, it's often to avoid a patent that they don't want to license or fight. I've been using 'simple keyboard' on Android, because it's just a g-d keyboard, but it doesn't do good spell check either. I didn't particularly notice spell check getting worse when I left windows phone, but there was a lot of other stuff going on.
The MS team that did Clippy would like to have a word with you...
It was an awesome piece of software, that nobody knew about.
Remember at the time many people did not have laptops. They often didn't have home internet either. Maybe they had AOL, or maybe nothing. They also didn't have a work VPN or any way to access files on their work computer.
I know I've experienced a point where the decision is made to discontinue something as adding what is needed to move forward will require too much investment versus benefit.
So obviously they didn't choose to remove features, they were forced to rebuild it from scratch.
And along the way, instead of it being a standalone product (which was really only justified because of competition from Yahoo Finance etc.), it made more sense for it to be simply part of Search, and so give simpler results.
Does that make sense? I don't think they torched anyone's goodwill here. It's not senseless -- to the contrary, there was a lot of sense to what they did.
If you want a serious finance tool, Google (or Apple) stock "apps" are probably not going to be the right choice in the first place.
I have no idea what you're getting at with the comment about Google recruiters.
I know the original chart tool was in Flash... I used it and described the features it had. Why after 10 years is the new version less useful than before?
Yahoo finance stayed separate and has been better for it. It doesn't make sense for stocks to be integrated into search - I completely disagree.
I never said anything about Google Finance being the only tool I used. It was a perfect place to start and once I found an interesting security I would move over into something more serious.
Does that make sense?
A bit more charity may have been warranted but I do see where he's coming from.
The first person said that Google dumbed down Google Finance "senselessly".
So, in context, I definitely took the response's "Does that make sense?" to mean "Was it a rational product decision on Google's part?" rather than "Can you understand this?".
You not personally finding it useful is not the same as it not "making sense".
If it made sense, then there wouldn’t be a need to reverse course today.
I think it only makes sense if you look at the incentives of Google as a corporation, and disregard the opinions of the people who used and liked Google Finance.
Anyhow it doesn't seem like Google might have ditched finance for this result. Increase in sheets usage is just a side effect.
A conversion made no sense at all. What we ended up having to do (and in hindsight was absolutely the right decision), was creating a new application completely.
The best way to "transition" for Google with Flash would be to probably, similarly, just create a new application.
I can't see how scaling would be an issue since the tricky/ resource intense bits happen on the client end. We're building interactive charts which are comparable to the Google Finance ones with a fairly tiny developer team.
If Google hasn't migrated functionality, it's because the Finance product hasn't met their goals and they've trimmed the team back.
Do you have a recommendation of any free tool?
If it's NIH Syndrome and/or a low-status in terms of Google promotion fuel, we should just say that.
It went from being a navigation tool too being the "how do I get to consumption" tool.
Who forced them? I have always been Ok with Flash and see no real reason to abandon it (besides driving sales for more powerful hardware which can do the same Flash did on Pentium 2 and with less code).
Assuming you're okay Flash being a closed product of Adobe (which was a huge problem for the web), it was also a bountiful garden of security issues, which Adobe didn't do a great job of managing.
There also are open-source implementation like Ruffle, Lightspark, Gnash etc (I never bothered to try any of them however).
Even the original Adobe Flash player is not dead - it will[1] be maintained by Harman for years to come.
Nevertheless, what I meant to say was nobody really forced or could force Google - AFAIK killing Flash was Google's and Apple's own initiative.
Biggest gripe is that the URL format can't be user to directly open a stock's page without remembering the exchange a given stock is on.
This URL will bring up Google's stock:
> https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ
This URL will not:
[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-2-publicly-traded-companies-have-t...
Even worse is that there seem to be variants (or is it the same stock simply traded on different marketplaces), which may be denominated in the same or a different currency.
And getting from one of the symbols to an ISIN and from an ISIN to the symbol is rarely easy. And I'm not sure if an exchange:ticker tuple always maps to exactly one ISIN (and one ISIN can definitely map to multiple exchange:ticket pairs).
The new SVG replacement is not as good.
Sadly this seems to continue down Google's trend of simplified controls, fewer power-user type interfaces.
And the timeline was annotated with significant news events, which was truly fantastic. This used to be an amazing product. Still, it's free, so I'm not going to complain too much.
It flew through every action without ever hiccuping for me.
Their interface couldn't drag and drop stock tickers, reorganize your list, update correctly, etc. Basic usability.
Maybe I don't know how tech companies' product management works, if it's underresourced or what, but such a giant company allowing a product (a simple, basic, not even requiring huge product innovation) to sleepwalk is hard to understand.
Do their team not get rewarded for working on basic, non-flashy products? Is that why it stagnated?
This is Google doing the bare minimum as an alternative to just shutting down another product. I'm surprised it has survived this long.
In 2011, I was heading development at Citadel's Investment Bank (Citadel being a large hedge fund), after finishing a stint as Citigroup Investment Bank's Chief Architect. I used Google Finance to track my personal portfolio, and I had always wondered about using the scale of Google to make Google Finance a competitor to Bloomberg and Reuters.
Someone reached out to me and asked me to interview for the position of "CTO of Google Finance", and I jumped at the chance. First interview was with Phillip Brittain, who was the new Head of Product of GF, having come from Bloomberg. The interview went great ... a complete meeting of the minds as far as where we wanted to take GF. Then I was invited in for the normal in-person Google interview process. I did well enough on my second round to be asked back to do the whole-day set of interviews. The interviews were really fascinated ... a lot of system design questions. But when I described some of the solutions in terms in terms of some of the platforms that financial companies use (ie: Tibco EMS for messaging), I was told by the interviewers to not bring them into my domain.
Funny enough, ove rthe two days of interviews, not a single person asked me a question about Google Finance or what my vision was for GF.
After several weeks, I heard that I did not have enough support of the Hiring Commitee to be hired. I was a bit puzzled, because I though that I knocked the interviews out of the park, but I went back to my job at Citadel and stayed there until they dissolved the investment bank a few months later.
Google never hired anyone for that position. Several years later, a Googler that I knew confided to me that I did not get the job mostly for the reason that Google had quietly decided to sunset GF ... or, at least, reduce its capabilities. No desire for a Bloomberg killer. What a shame. I still think of what I could have done with GF given the scale of Google.
I can confirm that MSFT has a "financial advice" club where people discuss trading strategies and such (among other things). It is just an employee club though, not something those people do as a part of their job responsibilities.
I was directly involved in the internal (open) debate (as a bystander and G Finance user at the time) when GFinance team were disbanded and the decision were made to fold it into Search.
Back then myself and the then TL of GFinance were engaged in some not so pleasant private messaging over internal mails. And I eventually asked HR to step in so that we can both stop engaging with each other.
At the time I was very confused why he would be defending the decision, which was obviously nonsensical, given how different are Finance data and Search, and how valuable is the finance data. Now I can see he probably were too professional and would want to still believe the company actually still cares about the little piece of product area that he has devoted a part of his career into.
Fast forward in 2019, I was directly hit by a reorg, where my own project, which I need to work with my manager to directly appeal to the Great Urs Hozle to get an approval (Urs personally rejected the staffing plan previous year), was transferred from Sunnyvale to Warsaw, during the time I am on a baby-bounding leave, and without consulting myself...
Well, at the moment I see how futile was it to spend my quickly diminishing creative life at this giant bubble. That's when I joined PixieLabs (https://pixielabs.ai/).
Now, I either stick to the really basic stuff in the stocks app or use Amaeritrade's iPad app which is pretty decent for low level research and I can trade from it.
Feels like the days of having a stocks/ business web page are gone, at least for me.
I want to see a zoom of how the stock did from 2012 through 2015. This functionality was stripped and still not returned?
This is the equivalent of having 5 inconsistently scaled preset zoom levels on Google maps. Zooming in isn't complex, and a lack of it completely weakens how you used a map product (or stock viewer).
It's amazing to me that they still haven't fixed what they tore out. Google really struggles with supporting customer products.
[1] Or TIPS or IEF or SHY or basically everything I've tested.
I haven't used the crippled version in years, why would I ever go back?
Haven't looked at what is out there in a while, any other alternatives people are using?
May I ask what specific usecases your internal tool was built for? And were you in the end able to build it to your satisfaction? I welcome any thoughts.
So we made a tool where you could: select various series of data, see their historical series, and also visualize your selections. This was helpful to assist our manual screening after we ran our automated filters (think Morningstar, just as a database query).
A real manual screen setup might start with something like: "I want retained earnings, outstanding debt, and fully diluted share counts for the last 5 years for AIZ and their top3 competitors". Plotted out, perhaps you notice that property insurance segments are fairly cyclical (weather/season) which can be a useful thing to tease out for an outsider/amateur. Or maybe you note that companies don't always break their revenue sections out the way you want, so you can't even do this analysis! (Looking at you, Alphabet & Youtube.)
We started with Yahoo prices and Yahoo fundamental data, but eventually realized that we still had to verify a lot of their data (against EDGAR). Quandl was a step up in price but we worried a lot less about data integrity with that, and by this time we were seeing some confirmation of results for our strategy.
We had a good ARR sustained over a couple years. However, the scalar value of the (risky!) gains was far too small to justify either quitting our tech jobs or sustaining an extra 40+ hours a week. The lessons were great, and seeing shenanigans in real life (looking at you, TSLA) but not in headlines is always fascinating.
We did do some concepting of a subscription for the research product, but I'd be surprised if that was realistic given our lack of marketing knowledge (and $). RH is a thing now though, so perhaps we were wrong.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/00007...
You can see which parts have XBRL tags by the red lines above and below. If you search the document for "orders" or "units" you can see lots of great information that is basically stranded. I've always thought that it shouldn't be that hard to use a bunch of heuristic rules to find data that is present in the last N 10-K or 10-Q filings (particularly because they tend to reference the previous year results, so you can search for numbers that are the same that are located within K words of certain strings).
But it's hard to do something really useful as a one-person effort with some clever coding, which is probably why the services that are out there are niche and expensive.
It's not perfect – XBRL is complicated and companies file with lots of proprietary metrics that aren't included in GAAP/FASB standards – but we hope to do more with it in the coming months.
Google trends predicts interest on the "Stocks" topic is about to go through the roof in the US. Interesting.
I was disappointed when Google Finance was demoted a few years ago, and many of its handy features were stripped away. I hope it's back for good, and that Google will continue to improve it.
Very useful if you are comparing two competing investments eg:
https://chartbehavior.com/app/v/IWD,%20IWF/2019/2020/cy_4!25...
Users: But this isn't as good as it was previously!
Google: I am altering the Deal, pray I don't alter it any further
Oh, they forgot to update that part.
Are there any good embeddable stock widgets out there?
We provide 10-15 years of financial history in a simple interface. Plus lots of tools for finding and analysing companies.