BIZARRE is the only way to describe the screenshot below of Google Finance’s homepage this morning — the day after the search giant reported earnings that missed analyst forecasts and sent its shares tumbling more than 7% in after-hours trading.
By all accounts, Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) earnings miss was big news. It is on the front page of the Wall Street Journal’s print edition, a major story in the New York Times, and it is the most talked-about topic at the technology news aggregator Techmeme.
But when I visited Google Finance’s homepage this morning, the biggest news story in techland was not mentioned at all.
If you click the image above you can access a large version of the screenshot on Flickr to see this for yourself.
You’ll notice that the main story is about Merrill Lynch and immediately below that is a story from CNNMoney.com headlined “Microsoft hit after earnings and forecast miss.“
And below that is a story from BusinessWeek titled “Investors Pummel Microsoft; IBM impresses.” But nothing about Google’s miss.
Perhaps most interesting is that when I went to BusinessWeek’s website myself, at the top of its homepage was this story headlined “Google: Weathering the Storm?” The story that Google Finance used was actually a secondary story. I took a screenshot of the BusinessWeek homepage at the same time.
So what is going on? I don’t know exactly, but it’s probably something to do with the timing of my visit and the peculiarities of Google’s news ranking algorithm. Just coincidence. Nothing untoward.
I hope that’s all it is, because it would be an even more bizarre story if someone at Google Finance has found a way to skew the front page against Google’s main rival Microsoft while keeping bad news about Google off the homepage.
I believe that there is an element of editorial which goes into Google’s News search results, for example sometimes a lead story is accompanied by a photo from another site. I think there may be someone sat in Google HQ ticking certain boxes.
It wouldn’t suprise me if they also had the power to control listings on Google Finance. Certainly some transparency issues there!