There has been a lot written about the relative accuracy of the information we find online when we search about various medical conditions.  It culminated in a Belgian campaign to encourage people not to Google their symptoms, and instead go straight to a professional for advice.

It’s an issue that Google themselves have tried to improve.  For instance, last year they began trials for a new telehealth service for people searching for medical issues online.

They have also begun to improve the search facility on their mobile search engine, especially for health related queries.

Prem Ramaswami, product manager at Google, revealed recently that they will be using Knowledge Graph technology to improve results for common medical search queries.

This will involve attempting to better understand the meanings behind words, and any relationship between the topics.  It’s a similar approach to that being taken by IBM with Watson, and their recent project to better identify related content.

“Starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front,” Ramaswami said.

“We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more.”

The developers at Google worked with a team of medical professionals to try and ensure that the information returned for each query accurately reflected the best clinical knowledge from the most reliable sources online.

It’s a crucial issue as around 5 percent of all queries are medical related in some way.  Whilst Google are at pains to point out that the information is just information, and should not be treated as a substitute for medical advice, they do nonetheless hope it will better inform and empower people.

“Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor,” they say.

The Knowledge Graph technology will be included in the English language search results for mobile users in the United States, before expanding, both in terms of territories but also the number of conditions covered.