A couple of days ago, Prem Ramaswami, a Google product manager announced that Google will start displaying relevant medical facts in the answer box we started to get familiar with or within an app on your smartphone. The answer comes from the Knowledge Graph: a complex algorithm that Google employs to understand and connect various facts about people, places and things and how these entities are all connected. Here is an example of what Google.com displays when I search for “measles” - notice the right hand box that contains the name, commons symptoms, treatments, frequency and an illustration.
The project itself is a huge undertaking involving several layers of information checkup by doctors and then, finally, signed of by the Mayo clinic, to ensure the information is both relevant and accurate. Prem Ramaswami estimates that, on average, 11.1 physicians would inspect and approve healthcare related information. It’s got to be quite expensive, but Google is determined to forge ahead. Why? A simple review of some key statistics related to searches on health care information point out an obvious answer:
● One in every 20 searches on Google is about health information, says Google.
● At least three-quarters (75%!) of all health inquiries begin at a search engine, says Pew Research Center.
● More than half of all health searches are now done on mobile devices, another Pew finding.
● 26% of online health seekers say they have been asked to pay for access to something they wanted to see online (just 2% say they did so).
● 31% of cell phone owners, and 52% of smartphone owners, have used their phone to look up health or medical information.
What can we expect in the near future? As a first phase, Google will start with 400 commonly searched for medical conditions with the intention of covering at least 10 percent of all current health searches. Presumably, this will gradually extend to a lot more. In the meantime, a lot of pages that derive traffic numbers from providing health information should perhaps expect their traffic to dwindle, unless they provide much more than just entry level information.
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