Health Sites: Some Are More Equal Than Others

January 21, 2010 · Filed Under trends & principles · 117 Comments 

Update: Roni Zeiger of Google Health emailed me and gave permission for me to post the following statement, which I think is a helpful addition to the conversation:

Health information is obviously an important category of information users are looking for. For this health search feature we decided to offer users one source each from a governmental health agency, a medical institution, and a commercial site. We’ll study how users like these choices and continue to iterate. None of these sites is paying any money to Google to be included in the feature. Google is 100% committed to ranking websites objectively to provide the most relevant information to users. Websites cannot pay for higher search rank.

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Eric Schmidt wants to solve health care’s “platform database problem” and one critic has  countered that “computers cannot practice medicine.” One of Google’s initiatives is to guide consumers to safe, trusted health websites. Is that such a bad thing?

Search result placement can make or break a site or a business model, which is where dot-com blogs come in, but they also have the potential to make or break a consumer’s access to health information, which is where e-patients.net comes in.

First, some background. Search is central to health information gathering: Two-thirds of consumer health inquiries start at a general search engine. The trend line for consumers’ reliance on health search is so steady, in fact, that Pew Internet stopped updating it in 2006. Other researchers seem to take search dominance as an article of faith, too: Harris Interactive, Manhattan Research, Center for Studying Health System Change, National Cancer Institute’s HINTS – none have recent data on health search, at least on their public sites.

What has changed are the search results. Read more

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