Dr. Google is on call

There are about 70,000 Google searches each second. Those searches happen every day, every week, every month and every year. That’s how much we want to know, learn and ask about things we don’t know. It includes searches for everything from the closest restaurant to the misspelled name of artists to everything else. Sometimes, Google finds it. Sometimes it doesn’t. But in all cases, it provides an educated guess about what you are looking for and what is the best answer for your question.

In the case of a restaurant, a wrong answer is not a big deal. But search results around health are a different story.

Out of all the searches, 7 percent of them are health-related. That’s about 4,900 searches per second. That’s over 420 million per day. The volume is mind boggling. But what’s even more interesting to think about is this: How many times does Google get it wrong? How many times do people take that bad advice which Google leads them to and act on it?

I am not implying that Google is responsible for the advice, nor for the content of the page you land on. I’m trying to provide a sense of the scope of the problem Google is trying to solve and exploring the implications of the quality of the search results.

Google has one huge advantage over anybody and anything out there. When people search for anything, they don’t lie. Think about it for a moment. People lie all the time to others, or to themselves. But they don’t when they want to know something. They know that Google is not going to judge them based on their inquiry.

How many times do people ask a question with the preamble ‘This is probably a stupid question’? You never do that to Google. You get straight to the point. (In case you are interested, I suggest a book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are).

Google knows the questions, Google knows the links which it is sending to people and what they click on. But Google doesn’t know if the advice was good or bad. Either the person resolves the problem and gets better, but doesn’t provide feedback to Google. Or the person dies and never searches again.

Google is tackling the problem from many angles. An example is their AI-assisted effort to identify if the person searching for something is having a personal crisis and should be talking to healthcare professional. (“Google says the new model will help its search engine with inquiries related to suicide, sexual assault, substance abuse and domestic violence.”)

Why would Google try to learn about human health? It is a big business. We are talking trillions of dollars every year spent on healthcare. Google has certain built-in advantages already that could help it capitalize on the opportunity, whether or not it keeps this separate from its ad business. As prolific tech entrepreneur Amit Rawal predicted:

For Google, aggregating and hosting of such large scale data clearly provides a strong growth opportunity for its Cloud business, which is a strategic priority. For medical providers, improving patient care is paramount, especially if they have a fixed fee per patient arrangement with the insurance companies. Moreover, the intelligent use of data can help identify new opportunities for additional tests/care and thus drive-up revenue.

And it is not just Google.

All the big (and small) companies are trying to find ways to get a slice of that healthcare spending. Do you remember IBM’s attempt to use its technology for medical diagnostics? This was the famous case of IBM Watson, the Jeopardy crusher. (After years of testing and millions of dollars spent, it was discontinued.) Apple is trying to monitor your vital signs with its watch and the number of devices you can put on your body from other makers are in the hundreds.

But Google has the advantage that people are asking questions of its search engine and they don’t lie to it. But it will take a long time before we can trust the answers. After all, they are produced by humans.

In the meantime, live healthier. Eat right. Exercise. Get your rest. You will reduce your dependency on Google and live longer. That’s a good recurrent pattern.

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