How will Google Compare change the insurance aggregator game?

As far back as 2006 – when presenting the Insurance 2020 study – I tended to hear the question “What if Google did insurance?” Well, Google has been doing insurance for about 2 years in the U.K. now, and very recently announced the big launch of the auto insurance aggregator part of Google Compare in the United States. Time for some random thoughts on Google and insurance.

• The reason this isn’t a full post is that there is already a bunch of good blog commentary about this on the Interwebz. This one by Jaffa Cohen-Iffra is a good one to check out.
• How much will Google change the aggregator game? Consider these graphs [1]:
  
  The data are fresh off the surveys for the upcoming study – so Sneak Peek (!) – and show pretty much the same picture as the last couple of years: young people prefer openly biased information, or put differently, they want to compare for themselves. You get a similar chart graphing agent and broker usage by age.
  Now Google isn’t just your average aggregator – It is a data collecting giant that knows much more about us than any aggregator does. Whether this translates to a change in the above picture? I don’t know.
• In the end, it will come back to the issue of trust. The reason why millennials prefer biased information is that they understand the “comparison motivation”, and they choose the comparison criteria. If Google can make that transparent, it might change the game.

Thoughts?