Spring is the season for love (and data)

Posted by AC Narendran & Katie Jacobs Stanton, Google Finance team

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, "In the Spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." In the spring at Google, a geek's fancy turns to thoughts of ... charts and data. So to mark this vernal equinox, we introduce to you Google Finance.

It all started as a small project led by a few engineers in Bangalore and later joined by more engineers and finance enthusiasts in Mountain View and New York . We have different backgrounds, work in different time zones, and, at the start of this project, had never met in person. But we shared the same goal: to improve the search experience for financial information. We hope Google Finance lives up to that aim by offering a fresh perspective on company-related searches. To begin with, you no longer have to remember a ticker or mutual fund symbol. Just search for a company or mutual fund by name and you'll quickly see all the relevant information.

But perhaps Google Finance's most important innovations take place after you've found the company in question. You'll find interactive charts that enable you to zoom through different time periods, headlines mapped right on the charts and are based on Google News, which means you're seeing unbiased and relevant results from more than 4,500 English-language news sources. And you'll get insightful comments from bloggers about public and private companies, plus Discussion Groups moderated by enthusiastic community advocates, which should foster some quality exchanges about the companies you care about.

Google Finance is an early-stage beta product. We hope to expand and improve this service over time, and your feedback will be a big part of that. So do let us know what you think.