Yahoo Finance is still a better product

Obviously, as a Googler, I want all Google products to so drastically outshine the competition that people around the world just send us checks out of a sheer sense of gratitude. If I had to pick one product that I'd like to see succeed like this, I'd choose Google Finance -- no one has really been innovating in the world of basic consumer-targeted financial web sites for a long time, and the Google Finance team is trying a lot of things to change the game.

But the product still misses some of the basics.

Case in point: Yesterday afternoon, I checked the Google stock price via the [goog]
query from the Google Toolbar.



Hey, we're up seven bucks, that's great! But that weird cliff in the middle of the day is odd. My gut instinct was that something market-wide had happened, so I went to the Google Finance home page to check for interesting headlines.



Nope, nothing interesting there that looks as though it should be bringing down GOOG, but the broad market summary on the left shows the same curve that GOOG had for the course of the day, so it does seem like *something* happened. Let's see what they have to say over at Yahoo Finance:



Boom! Right there -- "Stocks Turn Mixed After Fed Minutes".

The Google Finance team is innovating in a lot of great ways, and they're getting a lot of things right, but Yahoo Finance is still getting the most important things right.