First impression – big deal.  For the casual user just looking to see how the stock has performed over a certain time period or looking for a basic stats and news page, it passes the grade. Sure the interactive chart is cutting edge, but it doesn’t provide even the basics for good technical analysis, such as the 50 and 200 day moving averages.  If StockCharts.com could incorporate that kind of interactivity into their charts, then you have something impressive.  The biggest problem with finance portals is that they do everything average and very little exceptional.

Finance and investing blog commentary and analysis is becoming increasingly relevant and Google recognizes this, but they have a loooong way to go before those results are relevant.  In the results for blog entries you’ll find spam blogs and product pages – not exactly authoritative commentary by any stretch.

In my opinion, the de facto standard right now is Yahoo Finance and it will remain so. 

You can check out the Google Finance beta here