...UK price comparison sites - compared here

The search engine giant Google has decided to abandon its UK based mortgage comparison tool, known as "Compare Mortgages", just a few months after it launched, as the service did not turn out to be as successful as they had originally planned. However, they are thought to be working on a revamped version, although it is not yet known when this will be released, and the company claims that it has not made any firm decisions regarding its next step in this sector. In recent months, all of Google's global mortgage comparison services have been scaled back, and now in February 2012 the service has been completely closed.

According to a spokesperson for Google, "We’ve been prioritising our product efforts across Google, which means taking a hard look at products that haven’t been as successful as we would have hoped". The spokesperson then went on to state that they were "focused on building continued improvements into the rest of the product". Google still operates a comparison service in the US, which is known as 'Google Advisor', however this now lacks the functionality to compare mortgages. It does still offer comparison tools for other financial products though, including credit cards and bank accounts.

It is believed that the current precarious state of the mortgage and housing markets on both sides of the Atlantic has been a contributing factor to the decision, and it is likely that the service will reopen at some point in the future. Google demonstrated it's commitment to the comparison service sector with its surprise purchase of BeatThatQuote.com in 2011, one of the smaller price comparison sites in the UK, so using that technology as a platform for a similar service would appear to be a logical next step.