Dr. Google I presume

Billions of people use Google to search for medical information (myself included). Indeed, 1 in 20 Google searches is health related. Last week Google announced a new initiative to provide relevant medical facts in a box next to the search results for common health conditions:

"So starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators."

When I type in "measles" in the Google Search Bar, the Knowledge Graph box shows up on the right (Figure 1). There are three topic headings: 1) About, which provides an overview of the condition, 2) Symptoms, and 3) Treatments.

The content is primarily collected by automated computer algorithms that scan reputable medical information websites like Mayo Clinic and (presumably) WebMD,  MedlinePlus, MedicineNet, CDC, etc. In addition, Google has a team of doctors from Google or the Mayo Clinic review and validate the entries. Finally there is a helpful illustration:

"We use a combination of algorithms and medical professionals to create this medical information. First, our algorithms find and analyze health-related information from high-quality sites across the web. Then, teams of doctors carefully review and refine the information and licensed medical illustrators create the visuals."

The core technology underlying this new feature is Knowledge Graph, which has been playing a bigger and bigger role in Google Search over the past couple of years as Google has tried to directly answer search queries rather than just provide links. What is Knowledge Graph?

It is basically a ginormous database (or knowledge base), and "[a]s of 2012, its semantic network contained over 570 million objects and more than 18 billion facts about and relationships between different objects that are used to understand the meaning of the keywords entered for the search."

The Knowledge Graph result for a query is typically presented in a small box at the top or to the right of the search results; often it is a snippet of content from Wikipedia or some other reliable source. With the new service, Google has gone further than before by providing more in-depth information that has been validated by experts. Clearly Google considers this medical information to be valuable to users.

In summary, Google is now providing medical information directly available to the user (in a box to the right of the regular search results) in addition to a list of relevant links (Figure 1). In a sense this service competes directly with medical information websites like MayoClinic.org and WebMD. However the latter offer much more detailed information on a much wider variety of topics. I think people will find the Google descriptions useful because of their simplicity and easy access. Over time Google plans to expand the service to more medical terms.

Figure 1. The Google Search result for "measles". More detailed medical information in the box on the right is being provided by Google in addition to a list of links.