I spotted my super-low ARM deal several years ago from Bankrate.com, and I love the simplicity and usefulness of this website. It is sad to see the site gets sued by an angry advertiser.

A lawsuit against one of the Web's premier sites to shop for a mortgage underlines the difficulty consumers can have in locating reliable financial information online.

The lawsuit is against Bankrate Inc., the financial publisher behind the popular bankrate.com site that draws millions of visitors yearly through partnerships with Yahoo!, AOL and other top online companies. Bankrate provides advice, loan calculators and articles on financial topics. It supplies interest-rate data to eight of America's 10 largest newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal. It also caters to lenders, who compete to attract borrowers by posting their deals on bankrate.com.

But the company's reliability as a consumer tool is being challenged in the lawsuit, filed by a former advertiser, that accuses the company of allowing its Web site to become a haven for "bait-and-switch" loan pitches. Testimony and internal company documents filed with the court show Bankrate has fielded hundreds of complaints about mortgage lenders who fail to deliver the rates they advertise; one lender told a Bankrate employee a consumer would need "a direct pipeline to God" to qualify for its advertised rate. The legal battle, which began in 2002, is scheduled to come to trial this fall.

Bankrate says the lawsuit is "factually and legally without merit." Thomas Evans, Bankrate's chief executive officer, says that since he took over in 2004, the company has stepped up efforts to make sure lenders stand behind their advertised rates and won't hesitate to suspend advertisers who break the rules. Before, it was "like asking Barney Fife to monitor the town and not giving him a gun," he says. "It's a much more aggressive policy today than it was two years ago."

The court battle illustrates the potential hazards in the fast-expanding world of online commerce and highlights the need for healthy skepticism about experts who provide data and advice while at the same time benefiting from the sale of financial products.