This one falls firmly into the wild speculation category, but Search Engine Journal is reporting that this morning it saw a number of referrals from google.com/finance. The requests came from Google IPs and the referrers included queries for "GOOG," Google's stock symbol, and led to SEJ's most recent articles about Google. This would seem to indicate that google.com/finance is a site that rolls stock information, business news, and other relevant Google content into one portal. Google PR is characteristically mum, saying only, "We’re always exploring opportunities to expand our offerings, but don’t have anything to announce at this time." I agree with SEJ: The fact that Google Finance has its own google.com URL (and not just an internal Google IP) would seem to indicate that whatever it is, it's pretty close to launch. (And yes, the "logo" above is faked by me.)

[Via Jeremy Zawodny]