Google has improved the search experience for financial information. Here’s the site. It looks like Yahoo Finance, but much more slick. I’m not sure about the fixed-width layout, though. Search Engine Journal saw this coming. Batelle posted about it, but his site seems down at the moment. Maybe all the traffic from people reading the story?!

From the Google Finance FAQ:

How is Google Finance different from existing financial websites?
Google Finance offers an easier way to search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies. Further, Google Finance also offers a broad range of company news and information in order to deliver more relevant, unbiased results in a clean, uncluttered user interface.

Here are some specific Google Finance features:

• Company Search — With Google Finance you can search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies, using both company names and (where available) ticker symbols.
• Interactive Charts — Google Finance charts correlate market data with corresponding dated news stories to help you determine if there is a relationship between them (for instance, by seeing news stories that came out about a certain company in the context of what that company’s stock did that day). You can also click and drag the charts to see different time periods and zoom in to see more detailed information.
• News and More News — Google Finance incorporates our Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Stories are clustered by topic so you can see different opinions on a single subject; you can also review news stories by monthly date range and by importance (which is determined by algorithms).
• Blogs — If you want the opinions of citizen journalists, you got ‘em; Google Finance includes company-related postings from Google Blog Search.
• Company Management Team — Google Finance helps you put a face to a name. Mousing over an executive name shows you their picture as well as links, where available, to their biography, compensation details and trading activity.
• Discussion Groups — Talk amongst yourselves. Google Finance offers high-quality Discussion Groups whose dedicated team of moderators work to keep conversations on and spam-free.
• Portfolios — Google Finance offers a fast, easy and powerful way to keep create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.