Google recently launched Google Finance Beta for users to search for and find financial information about public and private companies, as well as mutual funds. It is poised to take on Yahoo! Finance, and other financial portals.

The Google Finance experience is enhanced via AJAX, and some of the highlights include:

• Interactive Charts – Google Finance takes financial charts one step further by mapping market data with corresponding news stories in one interactive chart, so users can track news to stock performance. Rich charts. Drag and drop, move around, external links change what is inside the charts built via Flash/Ajax interaction

• Search – Unlike many financial sites, Google Finance lets users search for public and private companies, as well as mutual funds, using both company names and ticker symbols. Users can also search for companies by the names of management team members

• News – Google Finance integrates the Google News service, which gathers stories from more than 4,500 English news sources worldwide. Google News is clustered in groups by news topic, rather than listed by date, so users do not have to scroll through multiple headlines on the same news story

• Blogs – Google Finance incorporates blog postings for related company information from Google Blog Search

• Discussion Groups – Google Finance helps users connect with each other by offering high quality discussion forums. To help ensure a high-quality experience, we have a team of folks dedicated to keeping the discussion groups free of spam and irrelevant posts

• Portfolios – Google Finance offers a fast and easy way to create and maintain your portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.

“Our goal with Google Finance is to enhance the user experience when searching for financial information and make this information useful and digestible for all types of users. While a lot of sites can tell users a stock moved, Google Finance offers context as to why by incorporating relevant news and blog postings,” said Google’s Press Release.

Google Finance is a free service.