Searching via the Standard Search Box

When you're looking for information about a particular stock or mutual fund, there are a number of ways to search Google for that information. The easiest way is to simply enter the stock or fund symbol into Google's search box, without any additional keywords, as shown in Figure 5.1.

You can also use the stocks: operator to signify that the keywords following are ticker symbols. This method is recommended if you're looking up multiple stocks at one time. Just enter the stocks: operator followed by one or more stock symbols, with each symbol separated by a space. For example, to look up information on Boeing (BA), Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT), you'd enter the following query: stocks: ba goog ibm msft.

At the top of the search results page is a section devoted to the stock you entered, as shown in Figure 5.2. This section includes a graph of the current day's stock performance; the current stock price; opening, high, and low prices; volume and average volume; and market capitalization (market cap). There are also links to full coverage of the company's stock at Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, MarketWatch, CNN Money, and Reuters. You can click any of these links for more information.

Figure 5.2. Basic stock information resulting from a standard Google search.

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