According to Pew Research Center, about 60 percent of the adults in US use internet to research and gather health information and approximately 35% of those adults end up using the information they find to diagnose themselves. With such high percentage of adult users looking for relevant information regarding health issues, it becomes important for search engines to display relevant and accurate data. Catering to these demands, Google is introducing a new feature of structured, curated and verified health information into its Knowledge Graph smart search algorithms.
For ensuring accurate information to be displayed for the users, Google has partnered withMayo Clinic to verify in-depth information for about more than 400 health and medical conditions. This feature works like any other result displays from Google’s Knowledge Graph where the user asks a question and get an immediate result at the top of the search results, versus links to websites where one can get more information.
Prem Ramaswami, Google Product Manager, in its official announcement said that it had worked with a team of medical doctors to carefully compile and curate this datasheet. He specified that all the gathered facts represent real-life clinical knowledge and high-quality medical sources across the web.
For instance, if the user types in ‘what is Tonsillitis’, then instead of getting a dictionary definition, wikipedia page and other links, the user will now get a large amount of details, as shown below, including symptoms, treatment analysis, segregation parameters to know the condition of the disease and more. For some conditions, the search results will offer high-quality illustrations from ‘licensed medical illustrators’. Although Google also cautioned that it is not a doctor, saying that these search results are not intended for/as medical advice. This will help the users to do more research and know what questions to ask theirs doctors, said the post.
This feature will be rolled out on Google in coming few days in US in English and eventually its global roll out. And future plans for this feature read out to include more medical conditions and more illustrations from medical practitioners.
For those who know less about Google’s Knowledge Graph, it is a feature that one has used it without noticing it. The features like currency or measurement conversions, calculator features in the search bar itself, etc. all come from Knowledge Graph. It makes your search results quicker and pleasant to use. Prior to this, Google would just present raw data in form of website links.
Google has been working on such creative and nifty projects in a very focused manner. This addition of health is great for the Google users, but this might result in decline of traffic on websites offering health information.
