Google Finance Gets A Date

The financial service site operated by Google actually got two dates, allowing visitors to customize the range of activity they see with a stock.

Google made a simple update to its Finance site, as they added a nice bit of functionality. Visitors may set a custom range of dates on the stock chart and view a stock’s performance over the designated time.

As noted on the Google Finance blog, the site gained custom date entry to show the viewer a preferred range of dates for a given commodity.

Pass the mouse over the date range on a stock’s chart, and the start and end date fields open for editing. One can look at a whole year’s performance, for example last year’s, by entering 2007 as the start date and 2008 as the end.

We found that if we entered a date that fell on a day where the market was normally not open, Google Finance would try to adjust to the nearest available business day. As a new feature on the still-in-beta Google Finance, it probably needs a little feedback and adjustment to optimize it further.

Google Finance always impressed us as a high-speed, no-frills alternative to the more voluminous offerings from Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, and publications like the Wall Street Journal. The interactive chart and the recent addition of real-time pricing for NASDAQ-traded securities continues to make it worth a visit.