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Google built its empire on innovations that served consumers well, but it's building its future on serving those consumers, and their personal data, up to advertisers. Not only that, but Google's new focus has the company pursuing projects that may actually be harmful to users.

Tens of millions of Americans take to the Web regularly to do our most important financial business. As we do, the company Corporate Insight is tracking which institutions are offering customers the best new online innovations. Here's what CI found:

Martin Zweig%u2019s unique, earnings-oriented approach to stock picking has produced consistently outstanding returns over a 15-year period, writes John Reese, who explains the growth and value components of Zweig%u2019s strategy and reviews some of his current holdings.

Oracle, Discover and Tiffany are all expected to report year-over-year growth for their most recent quarters this week. Meanwhile, many will be looking for an updated snapshot of the housing market, with three sets of real-estate data coming out.

Five of the six largest U.S. issuers of credit cards reported a drop last month in then percentage of credit-card balances deemed uncollectable. The drop suggests consumers may be making headway in their efforts to pay off their debts.

JP Morgan Chase became the first bank to drop its arbitration clause from its credit card contracts, so Chase credit card holders will have the right to go to court to dispute a problem with its credit card decisions. This decision was part of a settlement of an antitrust lawsuit filed by...