Google to offer mortgage search?

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and certainly the bigger you are, the bigger target you present to those who would take pot-shots.

But if a story which has appeared in the New York Times is to be believed, Google is looking to move into the fast-moving – and of course, in the current climate, highly topical – field of mortgages.

According to a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina Google may be entering the mortgage quoting business. While Google itself is not part of the suit, it gets a prominent mention according to the New York Times.

LendingTree, a leading online mortgage quote provider, is lining up its ammunition against Mortech, the company which provides some of the power behind LendingTree’s service. The wording of Lending Tree’s complaint explains how Google has been dragged into this spat.

“LendingTree recently learned that Google imminently plans to launch a loan aggregation service … that would compete with LendingTree,” it says. “Lending Tree has also learned that Mortech intends to make its pricing engine services available for use with Google’s new service and will send information related to mortgage loan offers to be displayed to consumers on Google’s website.”

Google has not publicly responded to the claims, merely issuing a general statement, which said: “We’re constantly looking for new ways to help people find what they are looking for on the Internet.

“As part of that effort, we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”

So should a tiny player in the market such as Lending Tree be worried about a potentially powerful new competitor, or is its stance merely born out of anti-Google sentiment arising from its perceived competitive advantage and dreams of world domination?

The original story: Google to Offer Mortgage Quotes.