It sounds somewhat quirky, but Google might soon be your new health consultant, and that too pretty authenticated. The search engine giant has staged yet another effort to add improvisation and refinement to its search results, specifically for people looking for health related information.Announced via a blog-post, the search engine is trying to bring some much-needed validity to the world of health-related searches with a new database of 400 commonly searched medical conditions that have been extensively fact-checked by doctors at the Mayo Clinic.
With the implementation to be rolled out in a day or two, the feature will show the information about basic health related issues on its search page itself.
Google product manager Prem Ramaswami wrote in the blog post-
Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.
All the information that appears have been verified by doctors at Google and Mayo clinic and holds complete authenticity. Yes, your read that right. Google’s own team of doctors is also reportedly involved in this project.
The company said that one in 20 searches are related to health issues and the new feature is introduced especially to address those queries and, yes, also to improvise its knowledge graph and search page results, the area that Google is primarily focusing on these days.
Google has already specified that the search results will not be as a hard core medical advice and the users should consult with their doctors if they are worried and need an absolute advice.
The feature will roll out in the US in English and will see an expansion to other countries soon. The broadening of the features will take place with time and the new information will be added accordingly.
Well, this isn’t the first time that Google has taken steps to improvise its knowledge graph and piss off those mostly unreliable, third party websites. Google begin to show song’s lyrics at the top of its search results pages when searched, bringing down an enormous amount of traffic for third party websites. The search giant also added links to the famous brands’ social profile on the results page itself later on.
