How to use Google to stay up to date with your medical condition

I was Googling for dolphins, as you do, and saw a really great search result. For animals, Google displays a beautiful box of information including relevant links to related classifications

This got me thinking on other ways that Google is useful for science. If you have a medical condition, there are a lot of tools and tricks you can use to let Google keep you up to date with news for your condition

Create an alert for new online mentions of a condition

http://www.google.co.uk/alerts will let you set up email alerts for any search query

The query above will send me a daily email about any news or blogs mentioning Lupus and New York, and the -wolf bit makes sure not to include anything about the other meaning of Lupus that I am not interested in. Alerts are a very easy way to stay up to date.

Find People with Blog search

You can use Google to search only for people’s personal blogs on a condition

(If you want to start you own blog, you can use Google’s free blog platform http://www.blogger.com)

Find Information with Video Search

In the same way as above, video search will show you videos on the topic you have searched for

Search for information only from trustworthy sources

Using site:edu in your search query will only pull results from academic domains

Use Google Scholar to find Academic articles

You can search Google Scholar for scientific articles on a condition. Here is an example for papers on Lupus

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=lupus

You can also do a search on legal documents in Google scholar, to find any published judgements that were about Lupus

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_sdt=2,5&q=lupus

If you are a researcher you can track the citations of your papers using Google Scholar

http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=new_profile&hl=en

Do you have any other tips? Let me know in the comments