Google's Finance Site Fumble

While the media have been rife with praise for Yahoo!(YHOO) for a rare trumping of Google(GOOG) -- Google folded its Answers service on Wednesday as Yahoo!'s rendition flourishes -- another area where Yahoo! has a commanding lead gets less attention.

It's been eight months since Google launched its Google Finance Web site to much fanfare. With the search juggernaut's enormous resources and winning streak, many thought it would only be a matter of time before Google's service would usurp the position of Yahoo! Finance -- the most visited financial site on the Web.

But Google Finance has failed to make a dent so far. Yahoo! Finance had 13.7 million users in October, about 24 times more than Google's 579,000, according to the research firm Nielsen Net Ratings. And users also tend to spend 28 minutes on Yahoo! Finance -- nearly twice as much time as users of Google Finance.

While Google continues to extend its lead in its main search business, its setbacks are worth noting because they shed light on the company's limitations. And sometimes the technological prowess that enables the company to dominate the hugely computational search-result sector can be an impediment when it comes to other types of user experiences.

"Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, 'In the Spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,'" the company wrote in announcing the launch of Google Finance in March. "In the spring at Google, a geek's fancy turns to thoughts of ... charts and data."

And while Google's efforts -- initially spearheaded by a team of engineers -- did produce an impressive chart for the time, it was pretty much to the neglect of everything else.