Google Finance Means Business

Remember that scare when China threatened to rein in spurious loans? And the stumble in U.S. markets a half-day later? Everyone was wondering that evening whether Chinese stocks would slide further. And for many, this meant after-market prices on Asian ETFs.

Or remember that tech stock you loved that surprised with its earnings, positive or negative, and you kept reloading a site that showed after-market data, moment by moment. It was only then that you started to make sense of that quote that popped up in high school: History is fate.

It says a lot about Google's plans for the future that it understands history so well. It says just as much about Yahoo! that after several years of providing after-market data on the side, it hasn't yet figured out a way to make this feature more obviously useful.

Then there are those five online videos on the Google Finance home page, one of which is displayed prominently at any given time. This is hardly a major innovation, and a feature that Yahoo! Finance has had for a while. But it offers a peek at how Google plans to monetize online video feeds.

Right now, those videos tend to be from undervalued resources, such as Reuters video. Should content providers pay Google a premium to reach a larger audience, it could help build a critical mass of advertisers to the online-video entity that Google wants to turn into a profit center. (TheStreet.com's videos appear on both sites.)

It's a long shot; for it to work, Google Finance needs to become a more valuable piece of online real estate -- but the promise is enticing.