Google has launched yet another financial comparison tool within its search results, this time showing a car insurance comparison tool for related searches.
If you take a look in the screenshot above, you can see that a search for “car insurance comparison” shows a new type of ad below the first couple of sponsored ads, but above the organic “natural” Google results – there are probably lots of different car insurance related keyword searches which would trigger this type of ad.
Clicking the little info icon gives the following text:
Based on your search query, we think you are trying to find car insurance. Clicking in this box will take you to our service that can provide you with car insurance quotes from car insurance providers. Our service is free to you but to operate this service, we are compensated by these providers.
Click “Start a new quote” and you get the following page, giving you the chance to enter your registration number or make/model of your car to begin searching for insurance:
We won’t go through every stage of the quote process, as the information you’re required to enter is all pretty standard. What I would say however, is that the layout of the forms and the explanation of each field that you have to enter is very good indeed. Here’s an example:
Google have obviously been concentrating on the user experience with this new tool, and it’s something they’d do well to apply to other product areas.
When you’ve filled in all the details, Google will present you with its list of car insurance quotes. There’s a decent range of insurers included, such as eSure, Sheila’s Wheels and SwiftCover.  In my case, there were 61 results, with 42 insurers unable to return quotes, so the provider list is massive. There’s also some good options for sorting the list of results by various criteria, plus if you’d like to narrow down the list, you can compare just a few against each other. Should you wish to add features or alter the details of the quote, then there are options to do this on the results page itself.
Click on the Buy link next to any result, and you’re given a summary of the policy details, and from there, if you choose to buy online you’ll be sent off to the provider’s website. There is also the option on some of the results to call the insurer.
Interestingly, there’s also an option on there to retrieve previous quotes, suggesting this is more likely to be a long-term play for Google, rather than just another test which will disappear in a few months, as their other financial product trials have done.
Of all Google’s attempts to provide financial comparison tools since their purchase of BeatThatQuote, this is the most polished and impressive, and therefore most likely to succeed.
I noticed this yesterday – my car is due for renewal on the 21st, so I entered my reg number – got all the details fine, but it wouldn’t let me change the car year! I’ll check it again next week – but not impress so far!
This is a great move by Google. As mentioned in your article, they are the brilliant at user experience and I’m sure this move will expand to other products and sectors… Compare, Confused and MoneySupermarket should be afraid… very afraid…
Wonderful, not only Google is awesome but they are becoming multi-functionally awesome!
:-) Google is googling itself and provide better services to the world.It is a great move by google and definitely many people will get benefit from this.
Although i agree google is pretty awesome they’re somewhat cheating their own system now and slowly pushing out the businesses and users that it needs. Google dominating the finance market which includes 100s of 1000s of businesses is not good for our already struggling economy’s!
Just a shame Google aren’t better at displaying relevant results for other search terms. Instead they are spending their time trying to make more money instead of small business making the money. This means more businesses will have to promote using adwords to be high enough for those clicks which means more bucks for Google