Google’s latest feature offering—also in Beta, as with almost everything else—is Google Finance. This is basically Google’s answer to other similar services by its competitors such as Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money. Google Finance offers users the ability to track news and information on stocks, mutual funds, and other financial instruments relevant to both publicly-held and private companies. Aside from news and figures, Google Finance also promises to provide visual assistance to users, in the form of charts and other data.

Google promises to beat existing financial service portals at their own game by offering the trademark Google clean-cut interface and quick results presentation. From the Google Finance FAQ, here are some highlights of the new service:

• Company search – This service lets users search for stock and mutual fund information on public and private companies using either stock ticker symbols or company names.
• Interactive charts – This feature plots up-to-date company data with news stories according to chronological information to help correlate the data for possible relationships (such as cause-and-effect).
• News – Google Finance also presents information from the Google News service, which gives you news from over 4,500 licensed news sources worldwide. Stories may be organized by topics or by chronology.
• Blogs – Get insider information or opinions from citizen journalists or the financial experts themselves. Google Finance will include relevant blog posts gathered using Google Blog Search.
• Company Management Team – Google Finance presents company information such as organizational structure and the management teams. Of course, companies are made of people and not just products or services.
• Discussion groups – This feature lets users talk with each other in forum-type discussion groups. Google promises to keep the forums spam-free with efficient sets of moderators.
• Portfolios – Of course, financial information portals won’t be complete without portfolio management features. Google Finance lets you manage and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.

Trying out the service, I was impressed with the quickness of the response. It’s not as cluttered as Yahoo! Finance or MSN Money, but the information presented is quite sparse in comparison to the more established services. But I do like the way Google Finance presents all sorts of information—from news to opinions to blog posts—when you key in search terms in the search field.

Still, Google Finance’s basic features are the tip of the iceberg, as Google is likely to develop more services for its Finance portal. This new offering is something to watch (especially if you hold Google stock!).