There’s much ado about Google Finance, which was launched yesterday. They’ve done the typical Google thing by adding some nice AJAX-ish UI integration (actually done in Flash).

I submit to you that an under-appreciated feature is the simple “Search” box. Yahoo Finance, CNN Money, and pretty much every other finance site out there have the obnoxious “Get Quotes” search box, which expects ticker symbols, and a “Symbol Lookup” link if you don’t know the symbol.

Google turns this on its head, with a single lookup box, and it’s amazingly accurate. Requiring 2 separate search approaches was always obtuse and unnecessary, yet it took Google to fix something that’s been broken on the web for a decade.

I wonder what other sacred cows are ripe for hamburger meat. Much like Seth Godin’s mention of the tradition of black lens caps being dethroned by a transparent lens cap with a helpful message, it’s amazing how many things could be improved by considering if there’s any good reason for the tradition.

We had a great opportunity to attend Georgia Tech’s Spring career fair today. We were looking to fill several full-time positions as well as Summer and Fall co-op students. (If you think you’re qualified and interested, drop me a comment.)

Overall, we received 54 resumes over the course of the day. As we finished speaking to each person, we’d decide whether or not we should pursue them further, creating 2 piles of resumes.

33 resumes made the “good” pile, 21 made the “not so good” pile.

The interesting part came in a lull at the end of the day – we started looking at the resumes we received that were printed on premium paper, not just standard printer paper. Of the 13 “premium” resumes, 11 of them made the “good” pile. Both of the other two weren’t printed to align the watermark with the direction of the printing. 6 of the 11 “good” resumes were properly aligned.

The point is not that I’m some sort of resume snob. The interesting point is the correlation between quality candidates and the attention they put into their job search. Standard resume paper doesn’t indicate a bad candidate, but good paper seems to point strongly to a good candidate.

Of course since it’s possible that more bad candidates will start using good paper, we’ll stick with actually evaluating their skills, personality, and experience. I will keep monitoring this trend at future career fairs.