By Dominic Jones
THE Company Insight Center on BusinessWeek’s website has quickly become my favorite company research site. Lots of great information, really good usability for a new site, and I like that it’s backed by Standard & Poor’s data.
The site makes Yahoo! Finance seem old, cluttered and dull, and it completely and utterly blows Google Finance out of the water for usefulness.
Alas, I don’t know how long the Company Insight Center will be around because it doesn’t have a high profile. But it deserves much more attention than it’s getting.
My only issue with the site’s content is that while it offers much more information on international companies than either Yahoo! Finance or Google Finance (the blurb says 42,000 public companies worldwide) coverage of international companies isn’t as robust as that for U.S. companies.
There’s a huge gap in the free finance website category for a true global aggregator of public company information. The Company Insight Center comes the closest so far, but it still falls short. Regulatory filings are an obvious gap that should be easier to fill as more regulators start building centralized repositories.
I also wish there was a simple way to add their public company search to my browser’s search box. I could spend time to build my own, but how many people are going to do that?
With their search added to my browser, I could type in a name or keyword from anywhere on the Web and go direct to the results page on their site. Right now, I have the Company Insight Center bookmarked and it’s a chore remembering where it is — believe me, you haven’t seem my bookmarks! — so I’m not using the site as much as I could be.
Do yourself a favor and spend some time digging around this great new website. Pick a company and see what information is offered. Here’s the Schlumberger Limited (NYSE: SLB) page, which is currently their featured company.
And feel free to let me know if you think I’m wrong. I have great confidence that I’m not.
Dominic,
You are so right about the quality. When I was writing blog posts about international companies for my Rock Your Stock blog, it was so much easier to screen for candidates. Fortunately, the gap you mention in the information is usually available on the company’s web page so that mitigates the problem.
Good post.
[...] Money and Finance beta site, which has seen strong growth in visitors in recent months. I also like BusinessWeek’s Company Insight Center, though its less appealing to me than it used to be due to poor news release [...]