Mobile phones are great for keeping in touch with the latest information, but when there’s a lot of data to look at, a small screen can be a drawback. For financial queries, where you might want to see stock quotes, the latest news, a market overview or portfolio details, we’ve just launched a new approach in Google search.

To try it out, go to google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered device (2.1 or later) and search for your favourite stock ticker symbol.

The first thing you’ll see is an interactive graph shown on a card - you can switch views to different date ranges by tapping on the buttons below the graph.

If you swipe the card from right to left, you’ll get the latest financial news for the company.

Swipe again for a market overview, and if you’re logged in to your Google account and have created a Google Finance portfolio, a further swipe will show a summary of your stock portfolio. Give it a try on your mobile device now to see how it works.

This feature is available in English with support for more languages coming soon. We hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

Posted by Yu Chen, Software Engineer and Robert Hamilton, Product Manager

Just over a year ago, during a user experience research trip for Google Finance, we were at the home of a stay-at-home mom / day trader. She was frustrated that there were "personal blackout periods" in the trading day when she was entirely disconnected from the stock market -- for example, while she was ferrying kids around or at lunch with friends. Her situation wasn't unique. During our research visits, we had been hearing similar concerns from people who need to stay connected to the market. With the hope of resolving this dilemma, we started to design and build a finance application for the Android platform in our Google 20% time.

As the Finance for Android application took shape, and the team of 20% engineers grew, we added more features with the aim of allowing users to get stock quotes, market data, and news as fast as possible. If you are following the markets throughout the day, check out the real-time streaming quotes in your portfolio, fast stock look-ups with search auto-suggestion, and 'recent quotes' to make it even easier receive quotes on-the-go. For each stock, you can see detailed quotes, charts and news, and any change you make to your portfolio automatically syncs up with the Google Finance website. So now you don't have to worry about setting up a separate portfolio on your phone.

If you're in the US, you can now download Finance for Android from Android Market.











Posted by Arun Mathew, Lead engineer, and Nick Fey, User experience designer