Repackaging Google’s Rate Comparison Page

TechCrunch, you’ve been had.

I’m sorry to write that, because readers of this blog will know that I’ve long been a fan of TechCrunch. But TechCrunch has clearly been snowed by Google in its “launch” of Google Advisor.

Google said it launched Google Advisor today as a personal finance site. The fact is the rate comparison page has been up on Google for months now, and today’s launch is nothing but a marketing/PR ploy to hype awareness of the Google service. If TechCrunch is any example, Google has succeeded.

That is not to say the offering doesn’t deserve attention. Google’s strength, obviously, is taking wholly disparate data and making it cohesive and easily digestible. Even an attempt to do that for lending rates deserve our collective applause. Most of the rate comparison sites today — Bankrate, most notably — have made the process too cumbersome by forcing the customer to enter data on page after page in order to jack their traffic and boost their price per lead that lenders pay. Just streamlining out those aspects of rate comparison will help consumers. Which Google has been doing for several months.