Google Is Closing Google Compare, Its Financial Services Comparison Service | Hacker News Reader

Google Is Closing Google Compare, Its Financial Services Comparison Service

techcrunch.com

82 pointsromarv77 comments

Personally 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.

How 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.

I'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.

Interesting - 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."

Thanks for your testimony, so that service did make money. What was the name of the company that build it at first place?

A semi-educated guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeatThatQuote.com

And a funny footnote there: "BeatThatQuote.com was penalised by Google for search engine spamming the day after it acquired it."

Yea that's the one. That quote is quite amusing. We didn't do anything different the day after the acquisition, Google didn't do anything either. People just started talking about us, posting articles, blog posts, etc which had an effect on rankings. We dropped down in natural search because hey a thousand other higher ranked publications posted stories about us.

Honest question: what did you guys do differently from moneysupermarket, uswitch or confused?

AFAIU the "financial services comparison site" vertical in the UK was already very crowded by the time of the acquisition.

So the thing to understand here is that it's a two sided business. On one side the you're serving the consumer who wants price comparison of loans, mortgages, credit cards, insurance, etc and on the other side are financial services that want leads and are willing to pay for them. In essence, a two sided marketplace.

In many ways we weren't different, we provided the same services as the others. On the flip side, we were faster to release new products, integrate with financial service providers and we had a variety of business models that our partners preferred. When the financial crisis hit in 2007 we pivoted the model to include affiliate partnering which meant price comparison under our partners brands. Our competitors weren't really offering that. And that's actually one of the reasons Google acquired us, they wanted the contracts, the relationships, the partners and they wanted to use their own Google brand.

Google 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.

It'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".

if 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.

If they had looked at all those options, I would expect them to mention it in the sunset announcement. Wouldn't that help to avoid the sunset of one product negatively impacting other current & future products?

To the point on open sourcing, while valid for other ventures, Google Compare is largely not novel. They mostly partnered with existing vendors in the independent agent comparative rating space where this sort of technology is both common and mature.

Since they relied so heavily on partnerships and from what I could tell of Compare, I'd strongly doubt they could open much more than the interview process (which has next to no value).

They could have released it still, including the documentation that says how to connect it to an external database, etcetera.

Also hard to "open source" free top/center ad placement of the widget :) Perhaps the most relevant feature vs other existing financial services comparison websites.

I don't think you emphasized enough the "far less likely to adopt their next big idea" bit. It's massive. Developers used to simply assume whatever Google puts out is going to be huge, and the sooner they get onto it, the better off they'll be. Now, anything that Google puts out, it's far more sensible to take a "wait and see if other people use it" approach. If enough people do that, no one uses it!

I think Google are generally smart enough to factor this type of thing into their decision-making around "should we shut down X" but their approach to shutting things down does make me wonder how they value it.

Reminds me of how they decided to shutdown Google Wave before it really found it's feet. Sounds like it's down to needing to be in the mass user adoption, rather than niche product.

Yeah, Google are fortunate enough with their existing products & services that what might be a pretty exciting opportunity to other companies might be a sunset candidate for them.

>Google has been a complete imbecile when it comes to these things.

Why? A company the size of Google needs to prune these kinds of side-branches of their business so they don't become bloated and unwieldy.

>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!

There may be reasons you can't open source it. We wrote a AS3/Flex to JS/HTML compiler. I looked at open-sourcing it because it's cool, but right now it's totally tied to our build-chain and tailored for our specific purpose. It would take a lot of effort to properly put it out there, and if you don't do that work, people get pissed and complain.

>If i've been burnt by google shutting down something i've made part of my workflow or rely on

Yeah, but it isn't just google. What's the alternative? A scrappy start-up that will shut-down when acquired? Everything is a risk now.

We use fogbugz extensively. Will it be here next year? Probably, but who knows. Maybe it'll be acquired by Atlassian and shut-down tomorrow.

I downvoted this comment because its style heavily encourages low value combative tit-for-tat replies, half of it is quotations from the parent comment, and the remainder is posing questions in favour of adding thoughtful commentary

(parent comment was edited since this was posted)

You don't have to explain yourself. Down-votes are there for you to use.

Having said that, after scanning through your comment history, I'd say "Practice what you preach".

>(parent comment was edited since this was posted)

I did add a little blurb about the AS3/Flex compiler stuff. I don't know if it changes the comment substantially.

> We wrote a AS3/Flex to JS/HTML compiler. I looked at open-sourcing it because it's cool

I'd be prepared to chip in to a crowdfunding campaign to get that released.

Check OpenFL.

Looks good, but it's Haxe+3rd party frameworks, rather than AS3+Flex - which would mean a whole bunch of porting, I'm afraid.

True. I was suggesting because, in my experience, porting was quite simple, just several rounds of search replace (and some unexpected surprise here or there). That was some time ago, I'm not sure about how much things might have changed.

You're not alone on that: http://didgoogleshutdown.com

It's missing Chrome, weirdly.

They are also missing the service I use most from Google (besides search): Maps.

For gmail it has an outlook of "sketchy" -- claiming that people are being moved over to inbox on mobile. I think this is a bit disingenuous and makes me wary of the other claims on what google projects might get the axe next. Gmail is google's mail service. It is just as, if not more, critical to their business than search. How else would they get such juicy detailed information about users? Changing from an app named "gmail" to an app named "inbox" for accessing gmail on a cell phone has no bearing on the health of gmail as a service.

Considering how sketchy google has been on services in the past this web site is a great website, but I think they need to fix the "health of gmail" status.

>or hell sells them to another company

I don't think anyone at Google has ever (OK, in this millennium) considered an option to sell something. I guess it's a kind of superstition among top management, a sign of weakness perhaps.

Correct me if I'm wrong and Google has actually sold anything.

I suspect it's strategic more than lack of intelligence. When you sell a company, you generally have to sell the people associated with the product. (A code base isn't worth anything on it's own without people who know it, and people selling it)

There was Motorola, which was sold to lenovo

Forgot about it, thank you. But it wasn't Google's product.

The first thing that comes to mind is the sale of a part of Motorola. That's probably not what you were aiming for since that was not a "product" and Motorola was already bought with splitting the company in mind.

SketchUp is probably the only software product they've sold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SketchUp

> Correct me if I'm wrong and Google has actually sold anything.

You're wrong, Google sold SketchUp[1] in 2012. SketchUp most likely wasn't hardwired into Google infrastructure (as a desktop app), and had been an acquisition.

1. http://investor.trimble.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=6676...

...or they could manage expectations by releasing it as an experimental service that could close at any time. Labs worked really well for that.

I thought this was quite an interesting comparison between "Old Google" and "New Google":

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.

Insurance Journal has more on the situation with comments from partners and analysts closer to the matter than TechCrunch:

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/02/22/399...

1. 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.

I 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.

I expect that new spinoffs would probably be branded under its own name.

Since 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/

Coverhound by the way has investors from American Family and ACE/Chubb and more carrier partnerships than Google had. Coverhound also was expanding beyond Auto in to commercial insurance. So I'd expect them to stick around a bit longer.

Thanks for sharing the link!

Thank 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.

Google 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 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)

>There has to be some other motivation.

Maybe only 50 million people were using the service instead of 100 million.

Could 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).

This 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.

Yes the shutter of the entire rest of the service is interesting. Though I can see an angle on why ads are still more profitable.

In the case of their auto insurance quoting part of the business, they were doing something far more sophisticated than just generating leads for credit cards and mortgages. They were actually a licensed agent and generating commissions from quoting and issuing policies. Auto instance is highly regulated and they need to be licensed to do what they were doing.

Three things at play here I see:

1. You are creating new market pressure on the companies that pay you. If companies offering these products stop paying you, then no one pays you.

2. The level of sophistication needed to operate a full quoting service is higher than one would imagine in insurance and I wouldn't be surprised with other financial products.

3. Just sell ads. It's relatively simple, unregulated (relative to financial products) and works in cooperation with (not against) the hand that feeds you.

Perhaps it is not as easy as you think.

Er, ok. It's up and working, right now.

Since Google is able to ensure it's the only ad in the SERPS with pictures, and it sits in the top spot, well...

I suspect the hard part is something other than making money on it. Maybe legal, anti-trust or other concerns?

How do you know it's working?

Wow, I'm surprised they didn't get dinged for anti-competitive practices for that - it looks very much like they were using their near-monopoly in search to try and drive people towards their comparison service and way from other, established players. (I'm guessing not enough people trusted Google to recommend the best comparison site, sticking with well-known ones like Money Supermarket instead.)

It could just be me...I tried a few more, and it seems to change quite a bit, sometimes I'm seeing other ads, sometimes not.

Google regularly uses its near-monopoly in search to try to drive people to other Google products. This includes advertising Chrome on its search page if you are foolish enough to visit from another browser.

The Foundem case is a well-documented example of Google's monopoly abuse, as considered by the FTC and the EU.

http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem_Google_Timeline.pdf

Really? The king of traffic can't monetize financial traffic? o.O

The article says they have no problems monetizing it, it's just that there's not enough interest.

Where 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

They 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.

The 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.

Aside 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 ?

I 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.

Well I live in the UK and didn't even know it existed.

In 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.

Holy crap, so it does

UK here - I'd never heard of it either.

I 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.

If you search for 'car insurance' you should see it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0gOtFCo_U7HSE0wV0g2b3VfTXM...

Not even available in NY and NJ. First time I heard about this service.

This 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.

Somebody needs to create a betting game "Which next?" to bet on next closed product by a company.

New business idea: clone Google services and wait for them to shut down. Profit!

I was not aware this service even existed.

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