May 13, 2009

Google Begins Health Search Experiment

Google has started a search experiment in relation to health-related queries. The experiment involves a survey, which is triggered by a small percentage of random health searches. The survey will ask whether or not a searcher is looking up a topic because s/he or a friend/relative is experiencing those symptoms or conditions.

The results will be used to help Google provide more relevant data related to public health. You may remember last year when Google launched Flu Trends. The tool used search trends to help determine where the flu was rearing its ugly head.

Of course, with the latest public health problem being the swine flu, providing trends wouldn't be so easy. With just around 6,000 cases worldwide, but millions of people talking about (and likely searching for) the swine flu, it would be far more difficult to provide a Swine Flu Trends.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

November 12, 2008

Google Tracks Flu Trends Across the United States

Every year the flu hits and while it may just seem like a miserable couple of weeks for those who get it, it actually kills 500,000 people worldwide a year.

Google is releasing a new tool called Google Flu Trends which tracks search queries to show where the flu is flaring up.

Of course, the best way to avoid the flu is to get a flu shot. Google provides a Flu Shot locator on the right hand sidebar of Flu Trends. (Of course, you can call your doctor or check with your local pharmacy, too.)

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 16, 2008

Inside the Googleplex: Google to Webcast Google Factory Tour of Search

All those media pundits who said Google is a publisher are wrong.

Google isn't a publisher. Google is a broadcaster. The 4th Network.

Or maybe just a search factory. We'll know for sure soon.

On Monday, May 19, 2008, Google will webcast the "Google Factory Tour of Search" from Mountain View, CA and their Googleplex headquarters. Featured will be VP Marissa Mayer and product directors R.J. Pittman, Carter Maslan, and Johanna Wright among other Googlers certain to make cameos.

The focus? Google Health. Not "health" as in "stock price" but Google Health as in Google Docs.

Google promises an insider's perspective on Search. You can't be any more of an insider than webcasting from Google's black box. Plus, the speakers will provide an update on Google Health.

You can find videos of executive talks and much more on the Official Google Channel on YouTube.

photo credit: Sydney Morning Herald

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 3, 2008

CNET News Kneecaps GOOGLE: Calls CEO Eric Schmidt "Lame"

Google had a tough Leap Year week: GOOG stock price nosedived, $15 billion in value evaporated and the Melissa Mayer San Fran mag headline wiped off the Web and replaced by the "Adventures of Marissa."

The gist of the story? The Power and The Glam not The Glory.

Then this weekend, CNET News whacked Google CEO Eric Schmidt in public.

CNET News reporter Elinor Mills apparently felt scorned. After flying cross-country to see Eric Schmidt's Google Health presentation and scheduling a 1:1 interview, Mills found him unwilling to answer questions - questions, that is, unrelated to Google Health (i.e. Microsoft-Yahoo merger, comScore report, Microsoft Health Vault).

So Mills vented her fury in public.

On her blog she wrote: "Give and take with the press is part of being in a position of responsibility at a highly visible public company. (Schmidt) saying everything but the topic at hand is off limits is, well, lame."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt lame? Judge for yourself in Frank Watson's post, "No Brokeback with Google Health" where he embedded Eric Schmidt's Google Health launch video.

Mills had tried a self-described "last-ditch, I-gotta-get-something-good-or-my-editor-is-going-to-kill-me question." She noted that she squeezed in a question about Microsoft's HealthVault and how it differs from Google Health. She reported Schmidt got up from his chair, and said, "That's it."

Mills's editor also called into question Google stonewalling CNET News:

"He certainly has the right to refuse to take questions, but it's unclear what led him to stonewall. Schmidt doesn't seem like a CEO who is afraid to go toe to toe with the press. Perhaps he wanted to make sure the message got out on Google Health, but Elinor had already heard all the details at the Orlando presentation and press conference."

To date her editor has not (as the scorned Mills feared) killed her.

The wisdom of the crowd? Journalist, heal thyself.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:56 AM | Permalink

No Brokeback With Google Health

The launching of Google Health last week and Microsoft's existing HealthVault, offers a serious benefit for access to people's health records thouigh it also opens a Pandora's Box of privacy issues.

Who should control the depository of such information - Microsoft and Google seem to want the job - giving it to the government would not necessarily be a good thing.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his keynote presentation at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference (HIMSS) explains the intent of the company's new product..

Posted by Frank Watson at 12:12 AM | Permalink

July 7, 2006

Google Health Scrapbook: Google's Health Portal

Via PaidContent and VC Ratings, Google is working on a health portal named the Google Health Scrapbook. From what I understand there will be a "directory" for patients, doctors, vendors and pharmaceutical each. Google "users will be able to log in with their own account information and do things such as add a new medical provider, check their medical records or pay their bills."

Google has been rumored to be working on a health portal for a while. With the hire of Adam Bosworth, Google's Architect, Google Health we expected more. But when Google released Google Co-Op, those rumors were shattered. These new reports will revitalize the rumors that Google is working on a health portal.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:23 PM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Co-op: Add Your Own Vertical Search To Google

Google said it would have a health-related announcement at today's Google Press Day -- but no, it's not Google Health. Instead, it's Google Co-op, a way for people to create specialized search engines by tapping into the main Google index or the option for searchers to pick preferred vertical search providers to show up in Google OneBox results. Yes, health information is one of the new features -- but this is more than Google Health. This is Google making a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging.

Subscribed Links

Let's start in with the specialty or vertical search providers, what Google calls subscribed links. Many are probably familiar with how for some queries, Google will show what it calls a OneBox result at the top of the "regular" results. For example, a search on san francisco hotels brings up a section like this at the top of the page

Local results for hotels near San Francisco, CA San Francisco Marriott - 1.0 miles NE - 55 4th St, San Francisco, 94103 - (415) 896-1600 Hyatt Hotels & Resorts: Park Hyatt San Francisco - 1.7 miles NE - 333 Battery St, San Francisco, 94111 - (415) 392-1234 Hyatt Hotels & Resorts: Hyatt at Fisherman's Wharf - 2.2 miles N - 555 N Point St, San Francisco, 94133 - (415) 563-1234

Those results are powered by one of Google's own vertical search engine, Google Maps (formerly Google Local). The new subscribed links service lets people choose other non-Google vertical search engines to show at the top of the page, if they want to.

It's a very cool idea. For example, say you are regularly searching for information about search engines and would like to know if Search Engine Watch specifically has any matching info along with searching the entire web for that topic. If we get our act together (and we'll try soon), you could make us one of your subscribed links. Then the next time you search for something where we have content, you might see our matches right at the top of Google.

Where do you find providers? Google's got a currently very small directory of them here to choose from. Preferred partners are already listed, partners that Google thinks people will be especially interested in, not those who have paid. No money is exchanging hands in either direction to be a subscribed link provider, Google says.

Digg is the only news provider listed at the moment. I subscribed to see how it works. Not too well. Perhaps not at all. Searches for Google, Playstation, Nintendo -- all topics on Digg right now -- brought nothing up. Hmm. I tried subscribing to People. Searches on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie gave me nothing.

Frankly, I don't think the system is working right just yet, as I'll get to further below. I also have a note out to Google about this. In the meantime, let's just pretend it's working. How do we at Search Engine Watch or anyone else get to be in that directory or a subscribed link partner in general.

Here's the guide that allows anyone to get started. I had to laugh at the intro:

The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills. This guide will show you how to create subscribed links, with plenty of examples along the way.

I laughed because in short order, I was lost! Barry Schwartz, who is a programmer, still felt lost himself and said he'd through it at "one of his XML guys" tomorrow. In contrast, making a Google Toolbar Button is a heck of a lot easier. I sure wish making subscribed links were, because they are potentially going to be an important new way for people to ensure they are getting traffic from Google.

Anyone can make a subscribed link to offer on via their own site (though the developer guide doesn't go into details about this, such as how to place it). Naturally, what you really want is to be in the directory that Google itself offers. Again, the developer guide doesn't cover this. But this appears to be the submission page.

As for who gets in, Google told me that those included and featured in the directory will be based on user uptake. Get a lot of people subscribing to your results, and you'll more likely be featured to users.

Two last things on Subscribed Links:

First, another OneBox! Just how much can Google shove above the "regular" results. Google tells me that they are currently trying not to show more than two of their own -- so potentially, you might be looking at three in all on the page. You'll never see more than on Subscribed Links OneBoxes, and these will come before Google's own.

Second, if the entire idea feels familiar, you might be recalling Yahoo Subscriptions. That launched last June and is explained more in our Yahoo Search Subscriptions Brings Premium Content Into Web Search article.

I've no idea how popular the service is, but I'm guessing not much, given that most people seem never to have heard of it. Unlike the Google system, the number of partners is very small and there's no API allowing anyone to jump in. Instead, you've got to go the contact form route. I suspect Google's system will be far more popular, since it should have a much wider range of providers.

Labels, Google Health & Vertical Search

A second part of Google Co-op is the ability to allow people to label URLs into different topic areas. You mean tagging! Google still prefers the term label, while I'm still a hold out for saying categories. But whatever the name, it's not like the idea of tagging you might be used to at other places. This is industrial-strength tagging.

For example, with Yahoo My Web 2.0, I can tag any page with any words I prefer. The system is really designed for me to tag on a one-by-one basis. If I do a search, see something I like, I can click the Save button, add a tag, some notes and have that individual page stored for easy recall.

Yes, I can import many pages and assign them all tags en masse. But that doesn't seem to be the case for most people. The system currently has only 1.1 million pages tagged, hardly double the amount I recall it having not long after launching last year. If there were massive tagging imports, I'd expect the number to be higher.

In contrast, Google's label system is initially designed as a more mass tagging system for those who want to create vertical search engines. Google's now rolled out a number of these:

Let's dive into the health area. Sure, call it Google Health if you want -- though Google says a more full-fledged Google Health is coming and definitely doesn't call this Google Health itself. Whatever you all it, this health thing lets you search against pages that have been labeled with the help of contributors such as the Mayo Clinic or the Harvard Medical School as being health-specific.

Ideally, it means that I should be able to do a search and get back only stuff related to health issues. Here's an example. Say I search for cold on regular Google. The first link is for the musical band Cold, and the third link is for Cold Stone Creamery. That's great place for ice cream, but the only health connection is that it might make you fat! Midway down, Macromedia shows up because of its ColdFusion product, then there are two links on the Cold War followed by two links on Cold Mountain.

For regular Google, this variety is fine. Who knows what you want when you search for the word cold? It could be any number of things. But for a health search, you want to get rid of all that junk. Google Health's labels ideally should do this. But go there, then search and what happens? Pretty much nothing. The off-topic stuff I mentioned is still there!

I suspect there's a bug in the system right now. Google Co-op didn't go live when announced, and then it slowly came up. I'll check on this, and the better test will be in a day or so, especially when some of these new topical areas are pitted against existing verticals in various areas. But conceptually, hopefully you'll understand what's happening. In each of the topic areas above, either contributors have helped label content or Google's worked behind-the-scenes to get some of these going.

Keep in mind that for any top level label/topic/category, there are also sublabels/subtopics/subcategories. So for health, you'll see further narrowing options such as:

Symptoms
Treatment
Drug Uses
Support Groups

What about for the more individual user that wants to label? Good luck. Here are a bunch of instructions. They make my head spin. Maybe it will spin less when I read it many more times. But compared to tagging elsewhere, it's a nightmare.

Heck, it's a nightmare compared to trying to make a vertical search engine period versus a place like Rollyo. Want to make a health vertical search engine there? Give it up to 25 web sites and you're done.

Google told me it does want to make the process easier for anyone to take part, so hang in there, if the programming stuff makes you feel excluded as it does me.

The downside to Rollyo, compared to what Google's doing, is that you won't have all the refinement and subcategories. But I find it difficult to understand how well these will work, anyway. There's no controlled vocabulary for new people coming in. Moreover, it seems like some of these refinements could be done through clustering. My Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks article goes into some depth about these types of issues from when Yahoo rolled out My Web 2.0. They seem just as applicable to the new Google label system.

When Yahoo launched My Web 2.0, my gut felt like we were making a big step backwards, using humans to do stuff where technology actually could work. I wrote similar things when Google Base went up, pushing people into tagging content when it might not be necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I want humans involved in the search process. If anything, I've also written about how the growth of crawlers and automation has pushed human help sadly -- and perhaps harmfully to relevance -- to the side.

Certainly it's a big positive that Google's letting humans more in the door this way -- a huge jump for the service that has pretty much looked to technology to solve everything, as it acknowledges.

"We've never given our users this much control and access into our system," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience. "We have an advantage with machines and how we crawl, but if we can turn our users into a network, that will yield better results."

Still, I think the idea of humans sharing and swapping what they like such as with Yahoo My Web or via the recent change with Google Reader might be the better way to go rather than manually tagging up millions of pages of content. But we'll see how it goes. As for the idea of subscribed links -- I've got a big thumbs-up for that part of Google Co-op.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped has a nice guide to how Google Co-op also works for publishers, though most of the examples shown are more static than dynamic data draws.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:12 PM | Permalink

May 8, 2006

New Way To Try Google Health (Maybe)

Garett Rogers reports and Philipp Lenssen reports on a what may appear to be some or all of Google Health, which we suspect will be coming this Wednesday. They both have screen captures of new query refinement that might be related to the expected lunch of Google health. I personally can't replicate it, but with some digging, Danny and I found a way for you to hit the underlying health filters.

Nico explains that he found a "Refine results" option when searching on a keyword. He snagged the HTML of the page and posted it here. Notice the additional filters:

+ Treatment + Research papers + From medical establishment + Symptoms + News + Alternative medicine.

Now, if you click on "Alternative medicine" you are taken here, where the query terms change to [migrane more:alternative_medicine] and not a simple search on alternative medicine. You can trigger these yourself, by adding these (i.e. more:condition_symptoms) type of elements to the query string.

It is also very interesting to note that in Philipp's post he showed that the link the Google Health result refinement takes you to is the same pattern as the refinement mentioned above. The URL he listed was "cx=disease_for_patients," which is the same as the one you get when you click on this.

So is this a sign of Google Health? Is it a sign of Google refinement OneBox results? Or is Google health using refinement filters?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:23 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2006

Google Health Coming Next Week?

A USA Today blog entry has a hint from Marissa Mayer of Google that Google Health may be coming as soon as next week. Marissa Mayer was quoted answering a question at USA Today in response to what to expect from Google's Press Day next week saying, "Health is an interesting one -- keep your eye out for that next week." Early hints Google was working on a health search product began here last March.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 5:06 PM | Permalink

April 7, 2006

Some Confirmation On Google Health

We've blogged earlier on rumors that Google might be developing a Google Health service and that Adam Bosworth might be involved as the "chief architect" of it. Now some confirmation from Google, which emailed me:

Health has been an area of interest at Google for some time. We (including Adam) have been doing a variety of research in this area, including how to improve the quality of health-related search results.

So, they're looking at it. What may emerge obviously remains to be seen.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:19 AM | Permalink

March 31, 2006

More On Google Health & Bosworth's Involvement

Philipp Lenssen writes of an "anonymous" source that tells him Google has a project named "Google Health." Google Health supposedly building out specialized vertical search solutions for health and medical searches, the similar to how Google handles other vertical searches. The source told him that he got the impression that Google was going to "build a self-diagnostic aid." In our past coverage we note of several engines that already have specialized health and medical search features. It is also important to note that Google has yet to respond to our questions about the Google Health project or if Bosworth is involved with that or has the title because he oversees the "health" of Google's tech systems.

Postscript: A reader sends us this note suggesting Google Health is indeed real and Bosworth is involved:

Bosworth was one of the Googlers who came to a recruitment drive at my university and introduced himself as "working on Google Health" or something like that. When I asked him what Google Health was, he said they "didn't know yet" but the kind of stuff he mentioned seemed to point towards a self-diagnosing thing, and how Google has all this information about medical stuff, and people go there for information anyway. He quickly changed the subject thoough, so unfortunately can't tell you much. But thought you might want to know that it seems Bosworth is indeed involved.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:29 AM | Permalink

March 20, 2006

Google Health To Cure The World?

Garett Rogers reports of a recent Google hire, Adam Bosworth, with the title "Architect, Google Health." Garett asks, what would the Architect, Google Health do at Google? I have read some speculation that Google's enormous database can potential cure the world of illnesses. It can help be a predictive gauge for diseases to come, as well. This is all just speculation, but based on Bosworth's background, something may be up at Google.

PostScript: I wanted to do a follow up on this entry, because I was not able to provide sufficient time to it early.

There are many health related search engines out there. Here is a round up of some of the health related vertical search from some of the big players and he small.

1) Conduct a search on influenza at Ask.com, notice the Smart Answer built in. 2) Try Yahoo also, a search on influenza shows you a Yahoo Shortcut result from the health.yahoo.com portal. 3) Medline Plus contains health information from the National Library of Medicine. There are over 700 diseases and topics updated by experts here and some excellent detailed health tutorials.

Also, Dean Giustini has a good write up on how Google is changing medicine.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:55 AM | Permalink

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