Google Followed Yahoo in Offering Real-Time Stock Quotes
Jun 02, 2008 
Sun
Not that it’s significant, but in case you haven’t noticed, Google Finance starts to offer real-time stock quotes for securities listed on the NASDAQ. What it means is that from now on, when you type in a ticker symbol in your Google toolbar, the quote you see will be real time, no more 20 minutes delay. Following is a screenshot I took at 3:00 this afternoon for the quote of BIDU.
Google’s free latest offer, however, is a little late and short of its rival, Yahoo, which started the service late last week with coverage of stocks listed on both NYSE and NASDAQ.
I really don’t understand the big deal behind delaying the quote by 20 minutes. If companies like Google and Yahoo have means to get free real-time quotes, they should make them available to users because for everyone who wants to make a trade based on the stock price, he/she already gets the real-time quote from his/her broker anyway. And for those who don’t care, whether the quote is real-time or delayed doesn’t make any difference.
Anyway, I am glad that Google and Yahoo make the real-time quotes available to everybody. It just makes two of my favorite financial tools more convenient.
If I remember right they have to pay a per user per month fee for people who get real time quotes, they get the info for free if it is delayed by 20 min. So basically they decided it was worth the price to give us instant pricing, or they got a really good deal…
Somehow, I don’t feel they have to pay on a per user basis every month. That would be a big money given how many people are using Google and Yahoo.