In a bid to better compete with Yahoo Finance, the front page of Google’s finance portal got a thorough overhaul Monday.

The move came in typical fashion. Google made no official announcement, there was no press release, and there was no note of the overhaul on Google’s official blog.

The changes come as Google has struggled to draw even with rival Yahoo’s widely-praised Yahoo Finance site. Not only does the site boast a wide array of features, but the fact many users keep track their stock portfolio through the service makes luring longtime users away difficult.

Partly as a result, Google Finance, with just 579,000 unique visitors in October lags well behind Yahoo Finance, with 13.7 million unique visitors during the same period, according to Nielsen Net Ratings.

The overhaul is the latest tweak to a high-profile Google service. On Saturday, Google added a feature to is GMail service allowing users to suck mail from any POP3 complain account into their GMail account (see “Search Giant Tweaks Gmail”). – Red Herring Staff