Google Finance, Blogs, and Politics - use COMPANY NAME, not TICKER SYMBOL
Note: Exposing Yahoo, Inc., or other companies, by having blog posts show up on a company's page in Google Finance, is accomplished by having the post rank highly for the company name, not company ticker symbol.
The algorithm used by Google to rank blog posts for Google Finance doesn't have anything to do with the company ticker symbol. It works off a search of the phrase of the full company name. It just looks like it's related to the ticker symbol, since that's how the Google finance page itself is organized, and many finance articles are written in a style of "[name] China Repression Associate Personnel [symbol] (Nasdaq: CRAP) ..."
This is very clear if you look at a company with a long name, such as e.g. "Check Point Software". You'll likely see many articles which make it clear that what matters is name, not symbol. So if you have a post about "Secure Computing (SCUR)", it's the "Secure Computing" part which matters, not the "(SCUR)" (the best phrase to use there is actually "Secure Computing Corporation". At best, the ticket symbol is a related word, but by no means the primary ranking factor.
Spammers have already discovered this use of blogs, so it'll probably be changed soon. But while the fun lasts, remember to Google-bomb with the correct target.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in google | on March 30, 2006 06:47 AM (Infothought permalink)
Thanks for that Seth - I have to say that haivng tried the ticker thing I couldn't see any difference so assumed there was some kind of selection process in play plus delays thorugh search propogation or some such other stuff.
Damn. Just when I thought it was easy to have a swipe at Barclays Bank PLC!
There is a proposal to add a ticker tag to the RSS spec.
This could be useful because it would allow a blogger to specify that they want their post to be connected to a specific company in a financial or business context.
We might also need some kind of ranking system for these posts to weed out as much spam as possible.
I've raise some of these issues and questions in my post on
Responsible use of this feature is vital to the credibility of the blogosphere.
Here is the link that I screwed up in the above comment about Google Finance already being spammed because Google's blog search isn't smart like Technorati's.
http://irwebreport.blogsome.com/2006/03/24/google-finance-spam-problem-undermines-credibility/