Improved Symptom Search on Google
The Internet has now become an integral part of our daily life, especially where obtaining health information is concerned. This is evidenced by a tremendous growth of search queries concerning health and medical issues. Unfortunately, finding the most accurate and relevant results for this is not that easy. There are times when we don’t always find what we are looking for, other times it is nearly instantaneous.
As an answer to this, Google introduced a new way of displaying health queries such as: (a) specific symptoms and related conditions, (b) medical services, (c) drugs and medications, (d) medical news, (e) Tips on how to stay healthy, and (f) discussion groups on health.
According to Google’s Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger: “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”
You must take note also that “the list of health conditions you see from the results 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 expert.“
To summarize, it appears that this update was made possible in order to reduce the time a visitor spends searching for useful data about common health complaints. While we professional SEO practitioners are keen on providing the best customer service, it’s good to know that search engines like Google are there to provide information on how we can maintain our physical well-being.
