Online search tools increasingly are being used to find health information, but it can be difficult to determine what information is trustworthy, Government Health IT reports.
"Search is great at finding us places with relevant information, but it is hard to know which links are reliable and which are less so," Adam Bosworth, Google's vice president of engineering, wrote on the Google blog.
Specialized health information providers, such as WebMD and the National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus, have included search capabilities on their Web sites, although these sites use a limited amount of clinical and academic sources for the information they provide. However, Google's Co-op platform allows Web developers to create customized search engines that provide all of the health information that its technology can collect.
"Usability studies show us that people want this kind of search to be as easy as possible, and they prefer to use Google," Joyce Backus, deputy chief of the National Library of Medicine's Public Services Division, said.
However, Google's keyword-based approach to searches produces links that do not reflect the relevance and breadth of medical data, George Krucik, senior product manager of Healthline Networks, said. Healthline uses a taxonomic approach to its medical searching, and it ranks the relevance of information based on how it links to other information in answering queries to specific illnesses.
Google has recognized its limitations in finding verifiable sources and has recruited the Mayo Clinic, the National Library of Medicine, CDC and the Medical Library Association to help it evaluate and tag trustworthy Web sites.
Other health search engines, such as Healia, use semantic search technology, which helps computers understand what search terms mean and how they relate to specific medical concepts, Government Health IT reports.
The problem associated with any online health search engine is that it assumes users will be able to understand the information once they find it, according to Government Health IT (Robinson, Government Health IT, 6/4).