Google Gives Its Finance Page A Facelift

Google has redesigned its finance page, adding better charts, a market trends module, and customizable portfolios.

Google Finance, launched in March, competes against similar offerings from rival portals such as Microsoft MSN and Yahoo, which is the most popular destination for financial information.

To try to catch the leader Yahoo, Google has added charts that display up to 40 years of historic data for U.S. stocks, and a trends module highlighting the market's top-moving companies, featured categorically by price, market cap, volume, and queries. In addition, registered users can build their own portfolios to track stocks and companies, and can upload information from other online portfolios.

The new homepage design, unveiled Tuesday, also provides a view to currency information and to the performance of sectors of the U.S. market. Google Finance is available at no charge and is still in beta.