I'm honestly not sure if i agree with this lawsuit (with a few assumptions).

As long as they don't market themselves as being "independent", and their comparison is accurate, what is the problem here? I think consumers have come to expect that comparison websites earn a commission for referrals. Any affiliation or commission should be transparently communicated though, even if this is what the user *should* expect.

I think it's a lot more problematic if these websites make unfair comparisons to competitors than it is to omit the competition entirely. Even the most basic due diligence of googling "life insurance" would show that there's more options and the comparison site isn't useful.

I disagree. Because claiming to be a comparison website is a lie, if you're only comparing stuff from one company. Hannover Insurance Policy Picker .com would be fair enough.

It's true that you can't expect comparison websites to be perfect. They may not even have access to all deals, there may be companies who won't wortk with them - and they may give undue prominence to the companies that pay them a commission. But in that case they're just a sub-optimal comparison website. This was a sham comparison website.

In this day and age, any comparison/review website must be treated like any other advertising site, as in ingonred.

You want honest reviews and comparison? Look for 2-3 stars reviews.

Isn't that how they all work?

Plus or minus a bit of added random noise, perhaps.

But they generally compare from multiple sources, not just a single company

Reviews and comparison magazines/sites have been a scam for decades, it's not anything new.

USwitch literally only considers a small handful of things for me, and when I run off and do my own switch, things work better and I get far more options.

Same for car insurance, I can play a dozen comparison sites off against each other and many big-names only appear on a small handful of sites, and their deals are often not significantly better at all.

Same when you used to go into Dixons/Currys and look at their fridges and realise that it was a model number they had basically made up for an existing product, rebranded, and then sold in stores only to stop you "comparing" it because nobody else could sell that model number.

My distrust in all these things means that I rarely, if ever, use them and if I do I only ever use them to exploit their lowest deals entirely (because they do the old bait-and-switch on you to give you a good introductory deal which they later do not offer to any existing customers ever again, only new customers).

It's all a scam, and nothing much has changed in decades.

I know someone who would only ever buy whatever Which? magazine recommended, in all kinds of areas. Turns out they always ended up buying a load of overpriced old shite. I always just found it hilarious - I've worked in IT for nearly 30 years and they would ask me my advice, I'd steer them towards exactly what they needed, told them why "their" (Which?'s) choice was junk, and they would then just buy whatever Which? recommended, which was always junk, and then they'd try to complain to me and make me do support for it. Nope.

I now don't trust any comparison, professional review, or site that claims to be impartial. The only thing I can do is look up the product specs, demo it for myself, and try to cherry-pick through the mass-aggregate reviews of 10,000 or more users and try to find the one review that does raise items of concern to me. I literally can't trust anything positive, all I can do is hunt for the stuff that makes me suspicious, like a pessimistic old crone, and then see if they were right. You mean that NAS does fail a lot and the restore process is a pain in the butt? Yeah, that's what I want to know. Not that it got 5 stars against the same manufacturer's previous model's 4-and-a-half stars.

I use the comparison sites to find a baseline price, then go to my preferred providers and get a better deal.

Also: price isn't everything, but it's all the comparison sites look at.

I agree that there should be at least a few different offerings to be able to claim a comparison is happening, but a lot of comparison engines are indeed pay-to-play. For instance, I'm pretty certain that the alternative shopping comparison sites that the EU forced Google to work with, like Redbrain and Idealo, are all getting paid for clicks — and the more merchants bid for a click, the more they get clicks.