May 20, 2011 15:30 GMT  ·  By

Google is dipping its toe into the consumer financial market with Google Advisor, a new website designed to help users find the best offers for all sorts financial products.

Google Advisor, available in the US only, makes it easy to find the best offer for credit cards, checking and savings accounts, CDs or mortgages based on a number of options and filters users can apply.

"Financial decisions may be some of the most difficult decisions we face—whether it’s finding the right credit card or understanding the impact of paying an extra point on a mortgage," Simon Arscott, Google Advisor Product Manager, wrote.

"To help solve these problems, we began testing a mortgage comparison tool in 2009 and have added other financial products such as credit cards, CDs, checking, and savings accounts," he explained.

"Today, we’re rolling these tools into one place: Google Advisor, a site designed to help you quickly find relevant financial products from many providers and compare them side-by-side," he announced.

The site works by enabling users to choose a product category they want and then narrowing down their options based on their specific preferences.

All of the products are listed free of charge on the site except mortgages. This is because Google Advisor is based on a number of existing tools, among which is Comparison Ads.

Google Search is not the biggest search engine by accident, it's great at what it's designed to do. In the quest to make it better, Google has been adding tools and features to it that fall out of what "search" usually means.

But this approach means that Google has mostly stayed away from "vertical" search engines, designed to do one thing and one thing only.

But this type of tools can come in rather handy in particular situations when you need a very specific type of information and not get distracted by generic search results.