What's Google Up to Next?

Wall Street firms are keeping an eye on Google, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., whose powerful news algorithms crawl the Web across 4,500 English language news sources. The Google News algorithms, which are totally automated, rank news stories by freshness, relevance and popularity of the source. Google is believed to be developing a product targeted at institutions with which firms could run customized analysis.

The company has been on a fact-finding mission to identify what the Street wants in a product, according to Peter Cherasia, CIO and senior managing director of Bear Stearns, who notes he has had several conversations with Google management. However, a spokeswoman for Google says the company has no intention of offering an institutional product.

In March, the ubiquitous search company launched Google Finance, a news aggregation portal, to compete with Yahoo! Finance and AOL as well as online brokers such as Charles Schwab and Fidelity Investments. One novel feature is that Google is overlaying the news on top of stock charts so users can click on a stock price level and see a correlation between the stock price and news stories, notes TABB Group senior consultant Adam Sussman.

"We're trying to offer people more context in one spot that's easier to get to," says a Google spokeswoman.