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Google Is Closing Google Compare, Its Financial Services Comparison Service
- CodingGuy 11y agoReally? The king of traffic can't monetize financial traffic? o.O
- halviti 11y agoThe article says they have no problems monetizing it, it's just that there's not enough interest.
- joshmaker 11y agoWhere in the article does it say that? > In its note, Google said that the product has received a good level of traffic from users but, when it came to revenue and activity, it “hasn’t driven the success we hoped for”. That sounds like they did have problems monetizing it
- ivoras 11y agoThey can't monetize it enough, which seems like a perfect situation to sell it to someone who will be happy with a lower cash flow point, or spin it off. It's actually surprising to me that big companies are so ready to kill products instead of selling them to someone who cares.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- martinald 11y agoThe thing is if they can't monitise it better than someone else, they're better letting them bid up the costs of AdWords (which i assume are pricey on these sorts of keywords). Lot of opportunity cost on this one.
- aikah 11y agoAside from being an ad network based on data-mining search what did Google successfully monetize ? are they making money with Android directly for instance or is it Ad-sense that is paying for that ?
- tyingq 11y agoI have a suspicion that this is more about avoiding a big anti-trust quagmire. When they starting dabbling around in the Travel sector, they did get push back...but that's an area where the power is spread across a large number of players, none of which is a powerhouse litigator or lobbyist. For insurance, credit cards, mortgages, etc, they would be at odds with a relatively small number of deep pocketed, litigious players with experience in political lobbying.
- feider 11y agoI hope Google encourages spin-offs to be launched from these closing services. Haven't used Google Compare as it's not available in my region, but it seems like a solid concept.
- HappyTypist 11y agoI expect that new spinoffs would probably be branded under its own name.
- rubyfan 11y agoSince Google mostly partnered on this you can get a similar comparison quoting experience from their partner Coverhound who is very much still in business. https://coverhound.com/ https://coverhound.com/
- shrewduser 11y agoGoogle has been a complete imbecile when it comes to these things. It's simple game theory, If i've been burnt by google shutting down something i've made part of my workflow or rely on (I'm sure most people at hacker news have been in this situation) I'm far less likely to adopt their next big idea. They could have a division which puts these projects on life support or hell sells them to another company or even open source some of their products and let the community support them! I'm still salty about google reader and their original podcast app on android among other things it would have been so easy to do right by their users.
- Klathmon 11y agoIt's easy to sit here and say "open source it!", but do you realize how much work that could entail? This was most likely written to take advantage of the google ecosystem. Written to work on Google hardware, with a Google database, using Google's internal messaging, using Google's custom source control, by Google employees, it probably tightly integrates with several proprietary Google services, etc... I'd be willing to be good money that even if it was open sourced (or sold) it would be almost entirely useless. And that's ignoring the fact that open sourcing (or selling) it might not be possible because there is a good chance it can contain trade secrets. I do agree with you that it's a problem when users are losing confidence in some products, but personally I feel that it would be better solved with better communication. Get some kind of messaging together that will let users know when their products are "core google" and when they are more "auxiliary".
- tyingq 11y agoAlso hard to "open source" free top/center ad placement of the widget :) Perhaps the most relevant feature vs other existing financial services comparison websites.
- shrewduser 11y agoif google has properly weighed up all the options (including open sourcing, selling, putting it on life-support, creating a team to manage EOL services or whatever other method you can think of) and decided that it makes the most sense to just kill it thereby hurting their users and in the process making their new services and ideas less likely to succeed then i'm totally fine with that decision. I guess my point is that i don't believe they've considered the fact that they're making their future endeavours harder for themselves.
- andygambles 11y agoWell I live in the UK and didn't even know it existed.
- andygambles 11y agoIn fact I just visited Google Compare and it contains "previous car insurance quotes" which were not done through Google but appear to be scraped from my Gmail.
- topbanana 11y agoHoly crap, so it does
- arethuza 11y agoUK here - I'd never heard of it either.
- oneloop 11y agoI like in the UK and I DID know it existed. However, I am in the industry, so that probably explains it. It was very incomplete in the number of cards it contained.
- dazc 11y agoIf you search for 'car insurance' you should see it. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0gOtFCo_U7HSE0wV0g2b3VfTXM/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0gOtFCo_U7HSE0wV0g2b3VfTXM...
- rubyfan 11y agoInsurance Journal has more on the situation with comments from partners and analysts closer to the matter than TechCrunch: http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/02/22/399490.htm http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/02/22/399...
- dman 11y agoNot even available in NY and NJ. First time I heard about this service.
- tyingq 11y agoGoogle is basically saying that it didn't make enough money. This seems dubious, as the effort should have been pretty low...this isn't rocket science, and the conversion/sales as compared to straight ads would have been higher. The screen real estate these widgets occupy will be replaced with lower performing ads. There has to be some other motivation. Edit: See http://imgur.com/a/8c9Xi http://imgur.com/a/8c9Xi These have to have a higher CTR and revenue stream than an ad. (edit 2: removed note about other ads being suppressed...happened for a while, then stopped)
- macspoofing 11y ago>There has to be some other motivation. Maybe only 50 million people were using the service instead of 100 million.
- rubyfan 11y agoCould be some other motivation but Insurance is a complex business. There are licenses with state departments of insurance, technology partnerships and then carrier partnerships. Any carrier with existing strong independent agent channels are going to react to consumer comparison shopping with some caution. Carriers simply aren't going to jump right in bed with Google and put their best sales channel at risk. As I understood it, Google was also asking for too much. They wanted special treatment and wanted to control much of the consumer experience even after the consumer purchases a policy with a carrier. Google might have figured out the most lucrative part of the insurance shopping cycle is advertising which carriers can control the experience on without creating a downward spiral on market premiums. Google can easily profit in that space with far lower overhead and less disruption to carriers (i.e. the people who pay Google).
- tyingq 11y agoThis was a service that was up and running. They are also shutting down the entire tool, which was more than just insurance comparison. They have credit cards, mortgages, and maybe other products as well. And, you don't have be a licensed insurer to display a comparison widget and get paid for conversions...you can drive your margins higher if you have the license, but it's not needed.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chuhnk 11y agoPersonally a sad day. I was an employee of the company acquired back in 2011 who went on to build this. I left Google in 2013 but most stayed on to see this through. I will say, as a standalone company we operated phenomenally and had solid revenue. I think that was entirely crippled once we got to Google and has a lot to do with the way Google operates versus a startup. Plus bureaucracy, plus big companies, plus people leaving after golden hand cuffs are off. To the team. You guys were awesome, it was a pleasure, I know you'll go on to do great things. End of an era.
- mathattack 11y agoHow much of the issue was internal (how Google builds) versus external (how Google sells)? The popular myth is that Google is much better at the former than the latter. I'm curious about your insider's view with respect to acquisitions.
- chuhnk 11y agoI'll start by saying these are my opinions and perspective based on my experience. I can't speak for senior management or other acquisitions. I agree with the sentiment. Google can build anything but they struggle to sell. I think part of that is being subject to anti-competitive practices and constantly under scrutiny which makes it difficult to use typical sales practices. It's also just not part of their DNA. They underestimate the need for the sales process and the human element of customer service. Being an acquisition that gets dropped into the big machine, everything slows down and all those tools you once used aren't so effective anymore.
- mathattack 11y agoInteresting - thank you for sharing your views. I wonder how much of it is senior management attention too. Google is very good at building 20x better mousetraps. Enterprise companies (say Oracle or Salesforce) are better at tackling immediate needs. Part is the market, part is the style of CEO. It takes a big shift to say "Build something incremental because someone will pay for it."
- cmcnally 11y agoI was not aware this service even existed.
- robk 11y agoThank God. This was such an un-Googley product to launch. The conflict of interest was terribly high with so many advertisers and from the UK at least they clearly intended to onebox this into the top of search results. As an ex-Googler in ads, I was embarrassed by this.
- robk 11y agoThank God. This was such an un-Googley product to launch. As an ex-Googler in ads, I was embarrassed by this.
- jeffmanu 11y agoIt's imperative that businesses do not go out of their 'sphere of competence". Google has tried to do this many times.
- Agustus 11y ago1. Did not know this service existed. How long had this been going on and why did it not show up, even accidentally, in the Google matrix drop down to give me a shot. 2. Oh, does not work in my state... Okay, no need to worry about this service then. Google, you are Google, get everyone on board for the domestic region before launching a service like this.
- eberfreitas 11y agoNew business idea: clone Google services and wait for them to shut down. Profit!
- Litost 11y agoI thought this was quite an interesting comparison between "Old Google" and "New Google": http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job/ http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/never-trust-a-corpora... Something i'm increasing attributing to the difference between making money and adding value, between a nash equilibrium and the socially optimal solution now seemingly picked up by volunteers like the Internet Archive :(. I still use google search, youtube and maps but increasingly i can only see this use dwindling partly due to malvertising but as mentioned due to the problem of not getting to depend on any google service. But also in the case of search because of privacy concerns and maps because (free) apps tied to Openstreetmap are so much better for anything other than driving, and i can contribute back to them etc.
- nikolay 11y agoSomebody needs to create a betting game "Which next?" to bet on next closed product by a company.
- rabboRubble 11y agoThis is why I have seriously embarked on the migration of services away from Google. Every time I really learn to love something Google offers, it's taken away.