fter months of searching, Mark Gross and Julie Raskin finally found their dream house.

The three-bedroom bungalow in Glen Ridge, N.J., came with built-in bookcases and a pleasant yard. Best of all, it was just half a block from the commuter railroad station. Gross, a compensation analyst for Lehman Brothers, the New York investment bankers, entered his bid and then did what most homebuyers do. He started looking for a mortgage.

Unlike most buyers, Gross did his mortgage shopping on the World Wide Web. "It's a very good research tool," he says. "I found some very good information." He used it first to compare rates and then to find contact information for several brokers in the Glen Ridge area. Still, he eventually found his mortgage, with a rate slightly higher than the lowest he had found online, by responding to a broker's ad in a local newspaper.

Gross's experience is typical. Many people who use the Web to comparison shop, not just for mortgages but for all kinds of products, often go to a local merchant for the final purchase. Gross says he felt more comfortable with a loan broker who was knowledgeable about the Glen Ridge real estate market.

So if you're likely to wind up going to a bank or a broker in the end, what's the point of using the Web in the first place?

"It's amazing how little people know what they need or what the market has to offer them," says Keith Gumbinger, vice president of HSH Associates, of Butler, N.J., which surveys mortgage loan rates. "They will shop for a $14,000 car, but they rarely do that for mortgages." He figures that nearly half of all homebuyers take the loan offered by a lender referred by the seller's real estate broker.

The variety and complexity of mortgage products has increased dramatically over the past two decades. When interest rates spiked in the late '70s, it forced lenders to be more creative about finding ways to help borrowers qualify for rates in double digits. Their solution was the adjustable-rate mortgage, which has since been followed by adjustable loans with rates that are fixed for three, five or seven years, 15-year mortgages, plans for twice-a-month payments and other variations.

In addition to resources such as Money's Loan Comparison Calculator and the Bank Rates Web site available on Decision Center, there are many other sites that can help buyers determine their needs and find the best available loan. Tips on what to look for when buying a house, how adjustable mortgages work, a glossary of terms, how to buy with little money down and a wide assortment of calculators are available.

For all the great information that's now on the Web, you won't find huge savings. The mortgage market is intensely competitive, and rates and terms offered to Web users rarely differ much from those you'd find by calling around to local lenders.

As far as most lenders are concerned, the Web remains an experiment. But they're looking ahead to a day when the mortgage origination process will be fully automated and conducted entirely online. Right now, though, you'll still have to deal with a human and sign a stack of forms to complete the transaction.

With literally thousands of lenders competing for business, many people are overwhelmed by the task of trying to decide who has the best rates. And it may not seem to matter all that much if the only factor you consider is the monthly payment. On a $100,000 loan at 7.5 percent, the payments are just $17 lower than at 7.75 percent. It hardly seems worth the effort until you realize that, over the life of a 30-year mortgage, the lower rate saves $6,000.

A recent survey of mortgage rates in several cities showed a spread of as much at 1.5 percent from the lowest to the highest annual percentage rate. Someone who shopped around and found the best rate would pay $101 less per month than a borrower paying the highest rate, and the savings over 30 years would add up to $36,250.

Decision Center's bank rate database contains information on a variety of loan products from more than 2,500 lenders. The data, provided by Bank Rate Monitor, is updated daily and covers 117 cities nationwide. Once you're ready to shop for a loan, the database offers a quick and easy way to familiarize yourself with the local market.

The surest road to saving money on a mortgage is to borrow less and repay sooner. Every $10,000 reduction in principal shaves $71 off the monthly payment and $25,000 off the lifetime cost of a 30-year, $100,000 loan at 7.75 percent. Origination fees and points are lower, too, and the extra $10,000 down may allow you to avoid paying mortgage insurance, which raises your effective interest rate by 0.32 percent to 0.9 percent until your equity in the home exceeds 20 percent.

Similarly, even though a 15-year loan carries a monthly payment about 30 percent higher (or $225 higher in this example), the 15-year savings add up to a whopping $88,000. Even if you had the discipline to save that $225 and invest it in stocks that returned an average of 10 percent per year, you would only accumulate $73,800 over 15 years after paying taxes on your gains - and you would have incurred much greater risk.