Sometime back I had blogged on release of google finance beta. Recently, I searched for an Indian company on google and found a result pointing to google finance in search list. Intrigued, went to check out the stuff and here is the deal as I see it:

1. Contrary to initial understanding, the search portal gives data on non-US companies too. Though it may take more time for more smaller companies to show up, I was able to get decent information on few mid to small cap Indian stocks.

2. On typing company name, the ajax like dropdown quickly shows the narrowing list of matched companies. Since stock code is displayed alongwith, it helps to narrow down to the right company especially if that company name is in multiple geographies. This is huge improvement compared to yahoo finance which is US centric, and one has to select another dropdown and then type company name again for non-US stocks.

3. As would expect from Google, the interface is clean, unclutterd, and as of now, free of ads.

4. The best part was the news part on the right side of page. Finding latest relevant news item on a company quickly is usually a time consuming exercise, but this is where google finance scores. The news items referred to recent stories in last 2 months or so, with latest ones as fresh as in last 24 hours. Some of news items pointed to other web pages, and others pointed to corporate actions news from Reuters (as some kind of a content deal). This is in line with original expectations that the finance portal will be a combination of free web content and content sourced from other financial information providers.

5. The Related Companies worked quite well for one of the mid cap pharma companies I searched for, where it showed other mid cap pharma competitors as expected. But for another diversified small auto company, it showed other major auto companies as related companies, which could be said to be related more as customers than competitors.

6. Signs of beta: Site links on a particular company Reliance Energy Limited did not work for most of the links - saying 404 Not Found.