There is no public market without public data. There is no free market without free data.

So here it is. It comes with no warranty whatsoever. This is probably illegal and it can even get you blocked from making request on all Google services. You have been warned.

If you are still with me, this is pretty exciting! Download the executable jar here. Download the code here.

So what it will do is scrape a couple of infos from a Google Finance company profile and output a well-formatted XML database of everything it could find (on the console for now).

Very easy to use too. You just run the jar and append the company names and/or tickers you want (separated by a space), for instance :

java -jar integralpha-gooscraper.jar NASDAQ:GOOG AAPL Microsoft

Now, if you see something like :

Not found / Non-unique : Aegon

This means that you provided an argument for which a Google Finance company profile could not be found OR that more than one company matches the query. You either have to be more specific or make sure you spelled the names and/or tickers right.

Now, what is really hot is this, you can append the path to an Excel file as an argument like this (and you can mix with "normal" query arguments as well) :

java -jar integralpha-gooscraper.jar AAPL Microsoft companies.xls

And it query Google Finance for every line in the first sheet in the file, provided that you have the following mandatory columns in the sheet :

1. Company ID in your system
2. Company name
3. Google ID (ticker as provided by Google)
4. Wikipedia ID (last path element in a Wikipedia article URL)

Any column can be blank, however, a Google Finance query will be attempted on either the company name or the Google ID (if the company name does not yield a unique result) to find the company profile, so if you want something, you need to fill at least column #1 and when just the name is not enough, column #2.

That's it for now, enjoy!