Google announces financial site; strikes deals with providers

Posted by John Burke on March 22, 2006 at 10:35 AM

Google announced this week that it will launch Google Finance, a financial news service that will compete with other pure Internet players like Yahoo and MSN which already have their own financial sites. Included in the sites launch are deals with a few financial content providers including Reuters and Morningstar.

For newspapers, two lessons can be learned.

Google obviously understands the Internet, the way people use it and interact on it. Even though it seems that through the deals it has made, the discussion groups it has set up and a human-edited feature called Google Finance Groups, it has organized a very comprehensive site, Google understands that it still has its limits. Thus, when crossed with something outside of its own specialties, Google will link to competitors.

As newsroom staffs and budgets shrink, newspaper newsholes are also being diminished. So if something important happens outside of a paper's competency, it could direct readers to other news organizations covering the story. Although this sounds contrary to the spirit of competition, readers are not only bound to understand the limits of their favorite paper, but will appreciate the service furnished by it in linking to other outlets.

Another lesson that newspapers can take from Google Finance is the way that Reuters approaches it. A Reuters spokesman said that the deal with Google will benefit the news agency as interested readers that click on Reuters links posted on Google Finance will be transported to a Reuters page. The GoogleNews aggregator works in the same way, driving traffic to newspaper websites.

However, it must be noted that money is suspected to be involved in the Reuters deal, something several publishers would like to see Google agree to with them when posting their headlines, abstracts and images on its news aggregator.

Sources: journalism.co.uk, PaidContent, Reuters