Feel Sick? Google Search Wants To Make It All Better
Starting this week, Google will include a question bar at the bottom of searches related to common ailments such as headaches and fevers, asking users if they searched those particular terms because of that specific ailment.
"Understanding how people search when they're feeling sick is an important problem to solve, as it can help improve projects like Google Flu Trends, which uses aggregated search data to detect influenza epidemics," wrote Roni Zeiger, M.D., product manager for Google Health, and Jeremy Ginsberg, software engineer, in a Wednesday posting to the Official Google Blog. "Statistics gathered in this experiment may also help Google deliver more relevant search results in the future. For example, someone who searches for [arthritis pain] to understand why an aging parent is experiencing joint pain might want to learn about nearby health facilities and potential treatments, whereas somebody who searches for [arthritis pain] because she is doing a research project might want results about how common arthritis is and what its risk factors are."
According to Zeiger and Ginsberg, the data will help Google in its efforts to make searches as specific to user needs as possible. They describe how if someone searches for "headache," the search question that pops up will ask: "Did you search because you or someone you know has a headache?" Likewise, with "ibuprofen," the search question will ask, "Did you search because you or someone you know is taking ibuprofen?"
"Data collected in this survey will be aggregated across thousands of users," Zeiger and Ginsberg wrote. "Survey responses will be stored together with the original search query, but will not be associated with e-mail addresses or other personally identifiable information."
At the end of the post, Zeiger and Ginsberg state that "survey data will not be used for advertising." Almost since its May 2008 inception, Google Health, the search giant's platform for users' personal health records, has been attacked by privacy watchdogs over whether its search-based advertising platform creates conflicts with storing personal health data.
Google has repeatedly denied the claim on its Public Policy Blog and elsewhere, continuing to insist that health data is entirely separate from its ad-supported search platform.