Google asks health professionals for site advice

Google Inc., the king of online search, is inviting physicians, as well as health care organizations, to improve the quality and reliability of health Web-site searching through a new product called Google Co-op it rolled out May 17 for beta testing.

Under the new service, the medical community could contribute or submit Web pages to Google they consider to be authoritative and credible. Those contributors would create links to those pages and enable online searchers to more quickly find their content. Thus, when searchers run a health search on Google, results from those contributors will be at the top of the results page, said Shashi Seth, a product manager for Google Co-op.

Based on how many people subscribe to the contributors' links, Google then would determine whether the contributors would be added to its Google Co-op directory using its automatic ranking algorithms. If contributors fail to crack the directory, then no one will see the content they submitted, Seth said. Google Co-op isn't a search engine itself, but a program within Google that helps delivers better, faster results for those who use Google's search engine.

Essentially, Google is using the expertise of contributors in a particular field such as medicine, and having searchers validate their expertise to refine and improve its search service. At press time, the enhanced search service is available only for the topics of health and travel. More topics will be added later, Seth said.

Under the health topic, information is divided into different categories, each of which is broken down into different labels. For example, when searchers type the word "malaria" in the Google Co-op search box, labels such as "symptoms," "test/diagnosis" and "treatment" will appear under the category of condition. And when they click on a particular label, results that contributing physicians deemed to fit that classification will appear, Seth said.

"Those labels are coming from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Medical School, Kaiser Permanente and our community of our users who are physicians," Seth said. "They have dedicated time and effort to go in and label URLs that are either within [or outside] their domain that they find are interesting and useful for the community at large."

Anyone can submit pages to Google, but whether physicians will participate will ride on whether they want to spend the time it will take them to annotate, label and submit Web pages to Google, Seth said.

To submit pages, contributors first have to go to the Google Co-op page, set up an account and then create a profile. When searchers access a contributor's link, they will see who the source was and be able to access background information about that person or organization.

Seth acknowledged that someone could deliberately pose as a physician or provide inaccurate information. However, he said he believes Google's community of users would quickly notify the search engine of errors. For example, if searchers don't subscribe to a contributor's links, or if they unsubscribe rapidly, that would tip off the company that it should examine those links, Seth said.

While Google dominates the online search space, it isn't the first company to attempt to improve health searches or deliver better health search results to consumers. Over the past year, several companies have launched medical or health search engines claiming to do just that. Those include Healthline, Healia and Mamma.com Inc.