A new help center

Posted by Ben Softness, Google Finance Support Lead

As part of our continuing effort to provide quick and easily accessible answers to your concerns and questions about Google Finance, we recently launched our brand new online help center. You can find the help center by clicking "About Google Finance" at the bottom of any Google Finance page or by pointing your browser to http://www.google.com/support/finance.

Whether you want to learn how to use a particular feature or seek information about how Google Finance works, the help center is your best resource. Plus, we've listed the five most common questions and made the entire site searchable from any help center page, so accessing the information that's most relevant to you is easier than ever.

If you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. While we can't promise an answer to every message we receive, know that we read everything you send us and that we use your feedback to improve Google Finance.

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Google Notebook can help with your research

Posted by Nick Fey, Google Finance designer

When we study how people make and gather notes when researching companies online, almost everyone tends to use a word processor, a spreadsheet, or (sadly) scraps of paper. Whatever they use, there seems to be consensus that they're generally dissatisfied with the approach and tools they use. We have something you may be unaware of which could solve some of these same problems. It's called Google Notebook.

Key features:

• It uses a browser plugin -- you can make notes no matter what website you're on.
• Create a notebook for each company you're researching to stay organized.
  
• Collaborate on notebooks with specific friends, coworkers, clients, investment club members.
• Search your notes to locate anything easily.
• No typing needed -- just highlight the text on the screen and drop it into your notes with one click.

Visit the Google Notebook website (http://www.google.com/notebook/) or take the Google Notebook tour.

Once you download and install the browser plugin you can access a notebook at any time from the bottom of your web browser.



Clicking on this icon at any time brings up the notebook which sits on top of the content of the page you are on. In the image below I have created a new notebook called 'Google Research':



I can highlight some content on the page like this:



...and hit the clip button on the notebook which drops the highlighted content into a note. Luckily it keeps the formatting.


Now I can highlight the whole market summary section, copy (Ctrl-C on my PC) and paste (Ctrl-V) it into the notepad. It pulls in all the formatting and images!



I can pop out the notebook to exist in a new window. Here I have navigated to the Financials page, highlighted a section of the table and pasted it straight in the notebook.



As part of my Google research I also pay a visit to Yahoo Finance and notice a news story that catches my eye. As the notebook is integrated with the browser I can clip the story straight into the same notebook. It retains the link to the story for me to access at a later date.



At the end of my research session I can visit the Google Notebook main site and here I have options to add collaborators and share the research with a co-worker who can type notes in themselves, clip or paste in their own website content. Here is also a search box where I can easily locate any notes I have previously made.



We are currently thinking through some ideas to integrate Google Notebook more closely with Google Finance to make the functionality even more useful. For example, displaying notes made about a company on the company page chart as flags similar to how we currently display news articles. We would love to hear your own ideas in the comments. If you give Notebook a try, please leave a comment describing how you got on with it and share any tips you come up with to help other Google Finance users make the most of this cool tool.

Update: Made a correction in the first paragraph.

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Finance in iGoogle

Posted by Nick Fey, Google Finance designer

There are some great Finance gadgets available on iGoogle (personalized Google search page), but it can be challenging to find the best Finance gadgets. Recently the iGoogle team have introduced the 'Share tab' feature which allows you to share a whole tab of gadgets. This has allowed us to pull together a collection of some of our favorite iGoogle gadgets and share them with you. If you click on the link below you will see an invitation to create a new iGoogle tab.

Add a Google Finance recommended iGoogle tab

Go ahead and click on the blue 'Add to iGoogle' button and it will create the new tab for you with these suggested gadgets.

You should see something similar to the screenshot below.



Now every time you do a web search you can view a quick overview of the market and see what is moving and shaking in your portfolios

One enhancement I would recommend is to add some Finance RSS feeds to the Google reader gadget. If you have not used Reader yet, you have been missing out big time. The big advantage with the Reader gadget is that you can read the story right on your iGoogle page rather than having to go to another website.

To set up your Reader gadget just follow these quick steps:

1. Click on the 'Google Reader' gadget title which is a link to the Google Reader main page.



2. Click on the 'Browse >>' link in the green 'Add subscription' box.



3. Ignore the 'Fun' group for now (there will be time for fun later) and follow the 'More bundles' link.



4. You can click on the 'subscribe' icon in the Finance group which will add a bundle of Finance RSS feeds to Reader in one go.



5. You are all done! Head back to your new iGoogle page and take a look at the updated Reader gadget.

If you don't like any of the RSS feeds you can click on the 'Google Reader' title again and remove them from the list. There are plenty more feeds out there that you may prefer and they are easy to search for and add to your reading list. Try adding http://googlefinanceblog.blogspot.com/ and you can see when there is a new post to this blog.

The Finance team is busy building useful new gadgets and we are also building tools to enable you to easily make your own Finance gadgets to share with the Google Finance community. We will let you know when we get some cool new stuff to check out. As always, we encourage you to leave comments with any suggestions for what you would like to see.

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Historical NTDOY

Posted by Matthew Simmons - Market Data Gnome

Many of you have noticed that we had a gap in our NTDOY charts, as well as with some other ADRs. I've fixed NTDOY, and am working on fixing the others. Thanks for the heads up, and please do report data errors as this is the best way we can quickly detect and resolve them.

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And now in Canada

Posted by Dion Loy, Google Finance engineer

Today we're pulling the wraps off Google Finance Canada, a localized version of Google Finance tailored for Canadian investors. One of our top requests has been for localized market information, presented of course in a useful and accessible format. We think Google Finance Canada addresses this by presenting top news and company news from Canadian sources, economic data from the Bank of Canada, multi-currency portfolios, and Canadian equity and mutual fund data. The main Google.com search experience has also been improved with Canadian stock onebox results. But speaking as a Canadian, my favourite feature is the company search that prioritizes Canadian companies (no more typing in Canadian exchange prefixes!).

What makes this release extra-special for us is the fact that it was put together by a distributed team of full-time and 20-percent-time engineers. (All the Google engineers may devote 20 percent of his or her work time towards a project of their own choosing.) We're grateful to have had the contributions of 20-percent engineers from our Hyderabad, Kirkland, Montreal, Mountain View, and New York offices to make this launch possible.

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Have a date with your favorite stock

Posted by Dave Marmaros, Technical Lead, Google Calendar

Want to know how your favorite stock is doing each day? Now you can! Google Calendar and Google Finance have teamed up to provide daily stock quotes.

Try searching for your favorite stock symbol in Calendar:



You will then be able to able to see the close price as an event each day.

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Survey says ...

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product Manager, Google Finance

First things first: thanks to all of you who posted so many great comments. We've enjoyed reading them and are excited to try this Q&A thing out. So now to the good stuff:

Internationalization. There are a lot of suggestions to add quotes from various international markets including Australia and India. We can assure you that we are committed to providing a comprehensive online finance product and we do believe internationalization is important. Currently, Google Finance offers quotes from many international stock exchanges including Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Toronto. It's great to have your input as to which markets should be our top priority. Stay tuned!

Tools. Many of you have asked for more tools like stock screeners. There are a bunch of online finance sites with stock screeners, but they could probably use some updating. We have a Noogler (a.k.a. "new Googler") on the team who is also keen to check out this space. In the comments section, please tell us more about the inadequacies you have with current stock screeners (i.e., What features are missing? What problems do you encounter?). Other tool requests include technical charts. We also agree that this is important. Which technicals would you most like to see?

Content. We've had a number of suggestions from people like Avinash (our most enthusiastic commenter!), to add earnings estimates, institutional ownership and options data. These are all very important pieces of content for investors and we agree that it's content we should spend time on. Thank you for pushing us in the right direction! Also, we often get requests to add more functionality for data such as downloading. If it were up to us, we would let you download everything, but we have certain content contracts in place which dictate otherwise. We'll be delighted to share your feedback with our content partners and let them know there is demand for more downloading rights. :)

Real-time quotes. Getting real-time quotes to you for free is one of the top requests we're seeing. We couldn't agree more. In January, we announced a deal with the New York Stock Exchange which would allow our dissemination of last sale quote data to all of our users for free. We reached a similar agreement with Nasdaq shortly thereafter. However, because market data pricing is regulated by the SEC, we have to wait for the SEC to approve these deals. We're as anxious as you are to get this out to you as soon as possible.

As for the Q&A itself: is this helpful? Should we do this more regularly? Please let us know. Thanks again for all your comments and ideas.

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