Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
Improving health searches, because your health matters
February 13, 2012
Every day, people search on Google for health information. Many of these searches relate to symptoms they or their loved ones may be experiencing. You might be trying to understand why you’ve had a headache every morning for a week or why your child has a tummy ache all of a sudden. Our data shows that a search for symptoms is often followed by a search for a related condition.
To make the process easier, now when you search for a symptom or set of symptoms, you'll often see a list of possibly related health conditions that you can use to refine your search. The list is generated by our algorithms that analyze data from pages across the web and surface the health conditions that appear to be related to your search.
For example, if you search for [abdominal pain on my right side], you’ll be able to quickly see some potentially related conditions and learn more about them by clicking on the links in the list.
The list of health conditions you see is aggregated from what’s written on the web about the symptoms you searched. The list is not authored by doctors and of course is not advice from medical experts.
We hope this feature makes it easier and faster to research symptoms and related health conditions on Google. We’re humbled by the number of people who turn to Google with such important questions, and we are working especially hard to make our search results even more useful for health searches.
Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist
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