Google to offer better medical advice when you search your symptoms

Of course, that alone is nothing new – WebMD has been falsely diagnosing folks with cancer for years now – but combined with Google’s existent functionality of showing information about specific conditions, this will save a lot of people some time and headache when hunting down the cause of their illness.

Developed with medical experts at Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic, Google had a team of doctors evaluate medical conditions based on a representative sample of searches. However, when an individual term is searched, like headache, Google will provide the user with an overview description, together with information on self-treatment options or recommend a doctor’s visit.

In Google’s official blog, the company said roughly 1 percent of the searches on Google, which equals millions of searches, are related to symptoms users are researching.

Starting Monday, Google’s mobile site as well as its iOS and Android apps will introduce a feature that aims to track down information on medical symptoms.

Obviously, symptom searches on Google are intended for information purposes only and users should see a doctor in case their symptoms are severe and last for several days. Google’s now making it easier to assuage all your hypochondriac fears by showing you information right from search results.

“We create the list of symptoms by looking for health conditions mentioned in web results”, according to Google’s blog post, “and then checking them against high-quality medical information we’ve collected from doctors for our Knowledge Graph”. However, symptom searches provide either inaccurate results or the terms found in results are too complicated to understand for someone who isn’t working in the medical system. “We rely on search results, and we reflect what’s on the web”, Pinchin wrote.

The company further said that the update will be released on mobiles in the next couple of days in the US. However, an global rollout with support for more languages and even more symptoms, is in the works.