Financial portal sites fighting for traffic

I read an interesting post over the weekend on the IR Web Report blog (http://www.irwebreport.com). The post is titled "Yahoo! Finance has lost its way" (can be found here: http://www.irwebreport.com/daily/2008/02/09/yahoo-finance-has-lost-its-way). I found it intriguing because it discusses a topic that iMiners is currently addressing through our Data Feeds application: useability and usefulness of financial portal sites. Yahoo! Finance, AOL Money and Finance, and MSN Money have been duking it out in recent months for top spot re: total unique visitors per month. Google Finance lags far behind. Each site has a plethora of information, catering to individual and institutional investors. But how easy is it to find information at each of these sites? How can they each be improved to make the user experience better? I'm sure the teams of people who work on these sites think about this 24/7, but our little team at iMiners thinks about it as well. We think what we are doing relative to company issued news releases is relevant to an investor's evaluation of a company. Categorizing a company's news releases makes it faster for investors to find what they are looking for, but if you go to any of these portal sites what you will find is simply a long chronological listing of a company's news. Google Finance is the only portal site of the four mentioned above that plots news on the stock chart to give context into what might be impacting a company's stock price, but they rarely plot company issued news releases (more often than not it is only articles from Forbes, Business Week, CNN Money, etc, etc). iMiners Data Feeds can enhance any financial portal site, and in coming weeks/months we intend to bring our applications to sites that are interested in making the end user experience a more productive, and ultimately, profitable one.