Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Yahoo! Finance is great, but I've always been hugely annoyed by the fact that you had to provide the exact symbol for a company if you wanted to get its quotes. Say that you didn't know the symbol for the Walt Disney Corporation -- just typing "Disney" into the Get Quotes input box should work fine, right? Nope. Instead, you'd get an error page saying that the symbol wasn't found, with a link over to the Symbol Lookup result for that query. One click later, you would be staring at the perfectly acceptable list of matching symbols, wondering why in the world you had to waste the last 5 seconds of your life on a completely useless intermediary page.

Times have changed -- don't go spending all of those 5 seconds in one place! Mercifully, the error page is gone; any queries that aren't exact matches for stock symbols will take you directly to the symbol lookup page. There's still another click to the actual quote page, but I suppose it does make sense to display all the options if there are multiple matching companies and regardless, the experience feels SO much more friendly now. There's still room for improvement (and I hear updates are in the pipeline), but this is a nice step in the right direction.

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