Google Advisor, showcased today at the Finovate Fall conference in New York, adds yet another channel for consumers to search for the best rates in credit-cards, mortgages, checking and savings accounts. But does the service, which had its official debut today after a soft launch in June, add anything to a field that includes BankRate, Lending Tree, HSH Associates and other information consolidators?

Google Advisor's home and inside pages don't look much different from other sites. Say you want to search for a certificate of deposit (CD): you'll get a list of CDs stack-ranked by return. So far, pretty run-of-the-mill. You also can trim the list to show just local banks; again, not so unique. You'll find similar-looking pages on Google Advisor if you search for mortgages, checking and savings accounts.

Search for mortgage rates, however, and Google Advisor has some features that look quite appealing. For one, noted Dan Shapiro, product manager, Google Advisor lets you connect to a lender via e-mail but ensures that the lender's reps don't then hound you for months afterward. It does that by providing a third-party e-mail address that expires after Google detects that the lender's e-mails are going unanswered by the consumer.

A newly-announced enhancement is an army of "secret shoppers" who call each bank that participates in Google Advisor twice a week to ensure that the advertised rates are still available. The shoppers also judge the banks' speed at picking up the phone and returning calls. Shoppers give points off to lenders that ask for unnecessary personal information and those whose reps say, "Let me take your number and someone will get back to you" rather than answering queries right away. Just one infraction can get a financial institution suspended from the site for several weeks, a rep told us; more serious problems can lead to a permanent ban. The company has plans in the near future to publish those shopper judgments, along with consumer feedback.

Google Advisor in its current form has two negatives of which consumers should be aware. One, its database is not particularly large: about 200 financial institutions for each product (CDs, mortgages, etc.). And lenders pay Google, both for inclusion on the site and for each time they get a lead. The mortgage page has a bidding process that enables lenders priority in placement on the page. "We don't share how that impacts" the product's placement on the Google Advisor page, a rep told us. "It's a black box."

UPDATE: Jodi Torres, consultant to credit unions, told me that Google's prices for financial institutions to get priority in its mortgage searches were steep, especially for credit unions. Translation: If a credit union is offering a competitive mortgage rate, it probably won't show up on Google Advisor.