by Playfuls Staff |
18th June 2006
Although when it was launched in March it drew a lot of attention, Google Finance has not yet come to surpass Yahoo Finance or MSN, according to Hitwise. [more]The statistics show that Yahoo is the leader in Web-finance domain with 34.9 percent share of the market, as of the week ending June 10, 2006. The second place is taken by MSN Money Central, with 13.67 percent while the third place goes to CNN Money, which holds 4.50 percent share.
Google is situated on a disappointing 38 place for the week ending June 10, with only 0.10 percent of the total finance searches. Hitwise included more than 900 sites for its investigation report (to be exact, 988).
Bill Tancer, Hitwise's general manager stated that :"Google Finance has good utilities, including charting. It also has a very clean user interface. But these features are not enough to capture market share in personal finance Web sites."
Tancer added that the key reason for which Google Finance is staying behind its rivals is that personal finance Web sites like Yahoo Finance are quite attractive and create a sort of dependence. "They allow users to personalize their stock and news preferences," he said. "It is hard for users to enter all the information again, and that is going to be the impediment to growing in the personal finance category. It is more difficult to gain share in the personal finance category than in other Web site categories."
The same analyst mentioned the other motive for Google's lack of finance (not financial) success: Google has not yet leveraged Google Finance's content among its other Web site properties. "For example, it is not easy to bridge Google's personalized home page to Google's financial information page," he said. "By comparison, this functionality is easier and seamless on Yahoo. The same argument holds for MSN."
Anyway, Google Finance's popularity no doubt will an important indicator of Google's ability to succeed as a provider of non-search, Web portal-type services, which is relatively new domain for the company.
But while Yahoo boasts with its supremacy in the finance-portal business, it also "boasts" with another first-place, only this time in China. According to a press release offered by Reporters Without Broders, a Paris-based organization with interests in freedom of speech and censorship-free mass-media, has reported that an investigation conducted on different search engines in China has proven that Yahoo.cn is the most compliant with the local communist regulations concerning censored content.
RWF stated that Yahoo was even more restrictive about "subversive" content than the locally-developed serach engine Baidu. Among the tested search-sites were Google.cn, MSN.cn and Baidu.cn. Compared to the later, Yahoo.cn was found to be more than pleasant for the local communist authorities, with 97% results in searches containing "subversive" key-words accepted by the chinese regulations. That overpasses even Baidu.
If someone had searched for a date or event related to the Tien-an-Men Square or the Tibet independence, Yahoo.cn would return an error message. The agency deemed both the high percentage of censorship and the strategy applied by Yahoo as "particularly shocking": "the press freedom organization is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. first because the search results on 'subversive' key words are 97 percent pro-Beijing". "It is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu." Even Baidu didn't restrict access to some of the sites that Yahoo did.
Yahoo passed over its operations in China last year to Alibaba.com, a Chinese marketplace, but in order to do that it had to pay over $1 billion for 40% of Alibaba's stocks. The same type of transaction was concluded when German giant Siemens sold its un-profitable mobile-telephony division to the Taiwanese company Benq.
There's no doubt about it, Google owns the search department.
