Google Finance Upgrade on the Money

Google(GOOG Quote) unveiled a slew of new features to its Google Finance site late Monday.

The new functionality is scheduled to be publicly announced on Google's company blog Tuesday and is intended to help Google Finance improve a service that has lagged far behind those offered by rivals Yahoo!(YHOO Quote), Microsoft(MSFT Quote) and AOL(TWX Quote) since its inception in March 2006.

Google's most recent changes -- a revamped user interface, a bigger bundling of historic data to work with its charts, a new way to sort through companies based on the day's news, the ability to import and customize portfolios, a new homepage design that allows users to monitor sector performance -- are the first steps of what hopefully marks a greater emphasis on a service that should get a lot more attention from the search giant.

Indeed, many of the new additions are a step in the right direction and a marked improvement, such as the streamlined user interface and the feature allowing investors to easily track sector performance.

The new interface makes the site considerably nimbler and easier to navigate. The sector feature enables investors to be tipped off to broader market movements -- such as an overall rotation into basic materials or health care, for example -- that can be more telling than the action in just one stock.

Other features, meanwhile, continue to be driven by Google's penchant to put what it sees as its strong suits -- be it interactivity or search -- ahead of a hardheaded consideration of what would best serve investors who use the site.