Google's just-launched finance site has prompted Yahoo to spruce up its market-leading Yahoo Finance with new information, multimedia, and style features, writes MediaPost, citing a Yahoo source. Yahoo plans to make stock charts more dynamic and will incorporate sound, motion and video in the site, which attracted some 12 million unique visitors in February according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google is not (yet) placing ads on Google Finance; text ads "are definitely a possibility… [but] rich media is not something we're considering in the short term," according to Katie Jacobs Stanton, a senior product manager at Google. Yahoo Finance's approach, however, is different, as its marketing partnerships are essential to its business model.

"Along with balancing our relationships with users and advertisers, the most important thing for us is making sure we're relevant to marketers," Richard Kosinski, category head for business and finance at Yahoo, is quoted as saying. "We have to provide marketers with the best solutions, and part of that is helping them understand user behavior on our site."