Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Google Finance

Google Finance has a much prettier user interface than Yahoo. The flash based chart is also neat, especially the marking of news tags.

However, as I start to look at the data seriously. I noticed that the data on Google Finance is generally less reliable than it's competitors. The price history could be wrong (compare the one year chart of FNF on Google v.s. Yahoo, for example), the financial statement sections might miss important information (for QWest, the quarterly balance sheet doesn't even have PP&E, and the annual report contains only Gross PP&E, no accumulated depreciation).

No matter how "cool" the user interface looks, garbage goes in, garbage comes out --- "beautified" garbage is still, garbage... I should probably go back and look at old fashioned Yahoo Finance...