All signs point to Google Health coming tomorrow. Here is what the blogosphere is saying.
blogservice:
“‘What constitutes credible health care information on the internet. Is there room for emerging and new discoveries, opinions, views of clinical experts?’ These are good questions. Medicine is as much of an art as a science. Allowing people to access information from many sources is important. How will Google preserve what I call the ‘many voices’ dynamic?”
LeeAnn Prescott:
“Hitwise clickstream data shows that for the month of April 2006, 2.67% of Google’s downstream traffic went to sites in the Health & Medical category. Yahoo! Search sent 2.43% of its traffic to this category, while MSN Search sent 1.97%, which shows that Health is a smart vertical initiative for Google.”
MedGadget:
“If this is real, it’s good. It’s not as jaw-dropping as Google Earth or as innovative and useful as Gmail, but it’s a start at categorizing the mountains of health info out there. Of course, health professionals know how to navigate this info better than the lay population, but we think the highlighted access to handouts and clinical trials will be appreciated by docs and nurses.”
ZDnet.com:
“Google Health delivers better results to users searching for medical information without them having to learn how a new service works. I do hope they eventually expand this service so it acts more like a health information portal.
I’m thinking it could turn into a service like Google Finance that links a bunch of Google services together. Groups to link users with similar conditions, Images to see visually how something might look, News to see if there are any recent medical breakthroughs, Maps to find local medical clinics, etc. Right now we just have integration with Search — but it’s a good step in the right direction.”
Susan Mernit:
“I did a test for throat cancer and while the Healthline results were excellent, the Google Health results were outstanding.
Is this the start of a Health vertical at Google? Will there be a medical-industry enterprise product? If I was a health care consultant, I’d sure be interested in how this search could be versioned for my needs.”
