GOOG is taking some intelligent steps to ensure that search users stay inside the Google ecosystem.

Google News now scans every story content for names of listed U.S. companies and adds related stock symbols near the story descriptions (see screenshot). As expected, these stock symbols are links to the company's page on Google Finance.

This clever integration will help expose the Google Finance service to new users plus visitors are less likely to visit a rival site like Yahoo Finance due to the convenience factor - read a breaking news on Google and click the stock ticker symbol to see the impact of the story on the share price.

And it comes just a week after Google started adding image thumbnails in organic search results.


Update: Steve Rubel has discovered that Google Finance has added RSS news feeds for each ticker symbol. That completes the cycle now.

Related: Yahoo Finance vs Google Finance ?, Google News Inverted Pyramid Model