Google Compare Auto Insurance | Hacker News Reader

Google Compare Auto Insurance

google.com

54 pointszackb38 comments

My first thought: here's another Google offering they won't promote, and will discontinue in a year or two. Why bother?

It reminds me of the "compare CD rates" page they had - I tried to find it just now, but it looks like they killed it off.

But I did find this - Google Compare credit cards:

https://www.google.com/compare/creditcard/qs#p=0

I'm completely guessing here, but I'm wondering if this was spawned from looking at their own internal data on Adwords? I'm sure there are advertisers spending ungodly amounts of money toward auto insurance.. and Google probably thinks "oh we can do that easy and better, and take premium space on search". I think I remember reading an article somewhere that it was one of the most expensive keywords possible (Although this article is dated):

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/07/18/most-expensive-...

What does it matter? Are you going to invest heavily in this car insurance comparison service? Are you worse off now that Google tries this thing out?

Maybe he goes shopping for new car insurance every six months and can't be bothered learning a new auto insurance comparison interface every time. This is a big problem for the two people who do that.

It's most devastating when you've built up a community, a way of life, around a car insurance comparison tool. Then the company pulls the plug, and even if you can download an archive of your data, you lose a lot that of the connections between you and your car insurance social network. That's why car insurance comparison is best as a decentralized network, so that if one provider goes away, you can still call the other fifty providers as usual.

Maybe he's working on a car insurance quote comparison startup.

I see that they are paid to promote some of those cards and that influences which ones they recommend, so this is just more Google sleaze.

I entered my name and number into an insurance finder once. I got calls for years after from every insurance company imaginable. The junk mail still comes. Never again am I giving away my personal info in a finder that passes it on.

It looks like they've thought of that. The link says that google generates a google voice number specifically for the call to protect your privacy.

My wife used Lendingtree.com once. She didn't even get finished creating a profile before banks started calling her. That was two years ago and we still get a call every now and then.

Not sure what input I provided wrong, or if its just the services Google is partnering with, but all the quotes provided are 2-3 times more than what I pay now.

Same here: all quotes I got are 70% to 110% more expensive than my current carrier, while excluding uninsured motorist coverage. Doesn't seem like a good selection of participating carriers.

I tried it. Why did they have to send me an email containing my quotes, versus just displaying the quotes on a results page? That seems particularly un-Googley. I hope my email address is not shared with any third parties.

This is how <all> the insurance aggregators do it. I don't have an answer why, but this is how they all do it.

https://www.thezebra.com/ <kind of> does it.

I understood why they did this 9 years ago, when I first bought auto-insurance online, but it's certainly not a technical requirement it be done this way now. My hunch is there's some kind of regulation/agreement between insurers that quotes not be made available on a website, and emailing the results is a loophole.

http://www.nerdwallet.com/insurance/compare-car-insurance-ra... does it.

Perhaps it takes time to interface and aggregate pricing data from the various quoting systems. I doubt your email address is shared, as part of a marketing agreement, as part of the quoting process.

Now, if you select a quote, then I imagine your email would be shared and a $xx commission would be paid to Google. Curious to review the terms or see the business heuristics.

Currently the auto-insurance industry is moving towards usage-based-insurance - which basically measures exactly how you drive your car and estimates your premiums based on that. It have shown to reduce prices by around 15%(and maybe there's more potential because it's new).

There are now enough insurance providers that support that model.And a large fractions of consumers does show interest, but they still have some potential issues preventing usage: fear that it might increase premiums, no way to compare this to regular insurance, and the need to install something to get all the data(preferably before you sign to insurance).

Google compare,coupled with all the data google potentially already have from our phones, can solve all those - and could even be more accurate using more data.

And long term, whoever controls this data controls the insurance market - because if you already buy from google compare - why would you ever install apps or but telematics hardware that collect driving data from someone else ?

So i think Google will be aggressive about that.

Where is this available? I checked places Austin TX, Rochester NY and Seattle WA.

Also not available in Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia. (Those were the only states I checked)

It is only available in California.

Insurance AdWords are among the most expensive. Insurance leads can pay upwards of $100. Seems like Google decided to get a piece of that action.

Isn't that already priced into the CPCs for the insurance category?

I think advertisers can price based only on keywords from current search and maybe some demographics. But Google has more data that would be interesting to insurance guys and worth money. Not sure it's implemented currently , but probably in the plans ahead.

Not available in NY/NJ areas

not available in hawaii

Checking in from Minnesota. Not here.

Nor in Wisconsin

Hi neighbor.

  *waves while driving by*

nor in Florida, where I am currently living

edit: or Pennsylvania where I'll be moving soon

What brings you to the NE?

contract work, I'll be in the tri-state area mainly PA/NJ/NYC for about 4 months working on getting a marketing team up to speed. glad I miss the snow, I hope.

Checked all my current and old states, no go for MA, NC, NY.

Not in Georgia either, they really need to list states available or not available on the page. Heck even share location usage would be nice to say, sorry we don't support your state

Google Compare Auto Insurance (In California)

Not available in Illinois, FWIW.

Or Arkansas.

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