Google Finance Streams Real Time Stock Quotes
Google’s Finance section now streams stock quotes in real time, a service not offered by most other financial information portals. Anyone can view these quotes for free and no user registration is required. Most recently, it expanded this feature to include additional quotes. Read on for more details.
A check of Dell Inc. and Intel Corp. stock on Google Finance produced real time quote data, whereas the same quotes provided by AOL Money & Finance and MSN Money were delayed by fifteen minutes. On some web browsers (like IE 7.0), the prices will update automatically each minute. With others (such as Opera 9.24), users must click the “Refresh” button for this to occur. When it reloads automatically, the title changes to reflect the current price, which allows prices to be referred to at a glance by looking at the browser tabs.
When real time quote streams were first introduced on Google Finance, only NASDAQ stocks were featured. However, other quotes recently became available in real time as well. For example, Eastman Kodak, General Motors, and Radio Shack stock prices no longer have a twenty minute delay. Google previously lagged behind Yahoo! Finance in this category, but has caught up. An advantage of Google’s stock quote pages in comparison to Yahoo! is that they provide more information about each company and fewer advertisements. Real-time stock quotes are also available on a few other large financial web sites, such as CNBC’s site.
Stock quotes (including the real time data) can also be conveniently retrieved through Google’s search engine, by searching for the company’s symbol or “[name] stock”. For example, a search for “AAPL” or “Apple stock” returns a quote and graph at the top of the results. Users can click on the “Google Finance” link above the graph for additional information about a particular stock. Some of the other major search engines offer this feature as well, including Yahoo! and Ask.com, but have yet to incorporate real time streams into this data.
Overall, Google Finance provides a good way to check current quotes on a wide variety of stocks, and is among a small number of sites offering free real-time quote data without registration. This seems likely to boost the popularity of Google Finance, while siphoning users away from the sites which still provide delayed quotes. However, Google will still have to overcome the fact that it is not very well known as a source of stock market data.
