How's my stock doing?

When you get asked the same question a half million times a day, you better have a good answer! I’m happy to announce that MSN Search has partnered with the MSN Money team to add a stock quote instant answer for stock related searches. You may ask, what’s a stock related search? Here’s how we decide:

Ticker search– If the search term is obviously a stock ticker, for example MSFT, we’ll include the quote instant answer. However, many ticker symbols can have multiple meanings. For example, a search for “Cat” could mean you are looking for the animal, or a quote for the Caterpillar, Inc. In this ambiguous case, we’ll look for something more specific, such as “CAT quote” before we include the stock quote instant answer with the web results.

Company name search – Don’t know the ticker symbol for a company? We will also show the quote answer when a company name and some part of the term “stock quote” are entered. For example, to get a quote for Whole Foods, the popular supermarket chain, you can search on “Whole Foods quote”.  We also support mutual funds; try “Fidelity Magellan quote”.

International quotes – Quotes are available for exchanges in 10 countries.  If you are searching from the MSN Search site in the US, you can request a quote for BMW on the Frankfurt exchange by appending the DE: country prefix to the ticker. “DE:BMW”. However, if you are looking for a stock in the same country as the MSN Search site you are using, the country prefix is not necessary. See “BMW” on the German MSN Search site. Here is the full list of countries and country prefixes: Canada (CA:), France (FR:), Germany (DE:), Great Britain (GB:), Italy (IT:), Japan (JP:), Netherlands (NL:), Spain (ES:), United States(US:), and Sweden (SE:).

Multiple Ticker symbols – You can also search on multiple tickers “MSFT GOOG YHOO quote” to view multiple quotes in a table.

In addition to the quote, we also show charts and news (if available) for the company. If you click on the chart in a stock answer, we link to MSN Money where a larger chart, in-depth company research, and real time quotes from NYSE and NASDAQ are available.

We plan on adding additional financial answers. As always, thanks for your feedback and suggestions!

Nils Pohlmann
Program Manager, MSN Search

Update: We have changed the functionality of the multiple ticker symbol answer. We now require the word “quote” to be a part of the query. This blog post has been updated to reflect the new functionality.