Wikinvest has been taking on popular finance sites, especially Yahoo Finance, since its redesign in June. Now it’s adding a feature that Yahoo lacks — a finance-focused search engine, which it calls “Bling.”
Visitors to sites like Yahoo and Wikinvest are often looking for a specific piece of data, says co-founder Parker Conrad — to use a phrase that Conrad is fond of, they’re “spearfishing for specific information,” such as Google’s revenue in 2008 or Apple’s profits in the last quarter. And it turns out that Yahoo and Google Finance aren’t actually great for finding this information.
Let’s say you wanted to find Google’s revenue last year. You could probably dig up those numbers, either by going to the company profile page in Yahoo or doing a general web search, but there’s no easy way to search for that specific number within Yahoo Finance itself, so you’d have to hunt around a bit. On Wikinvest, you just type in “Google revenue 2008,” and the site directs you to a page with the information you want.
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You can search for other types of financial and company info, such as the load factor for Delta Airlines or the profit margins at Home Depot. Conrad says this is just an early “alpha” test of the search engine, and Wikinvest plans to add other possible searches, like news stories and regulatory filings. The eventual goal is to turn Bling into the first place users go when they want to search for financial data.
By the way, you probably noticed that the site name and design look awfully similar to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. All Conrad will say, on-the-record at least, is that it’s a complete surprise and coincidence. Whether you believe him is another matter.
San Francisco-based Wikinvest has raised $2.5 million from DCM.
