Google introduces health symptom check app to diagnose common ailments

Users will get possible causes for their illness.

By Dileep Thekkethil

A few months back Google introduced Health Card for health-related searches in India, US, and Brazil.

Now it seems like the search engine giant is planning to move to the next level by launching a new health symptom checker, this after they found almost 1 percent of searches on Google (think: millions!) are symptom-related.

Dr. Google gives users medically accurate information, enabling them to self-diagnose diseases. The new health-based tool will roll out first in the US in the coming week.

Once introduced, health symptom checker will be part of the general Google search and will provide users details about possible medical conditions once they type in the symptom.

For example, if the user types the keyword “a headache”, Google will show results which will have the list of possible medical conditions such as “a migraine”, “a tension headache”, “sinusitis,” and “common cold”.

Google has confirmed that the results will come up only if the users type in the health problems that are verified in their database.

Google officials also said that a team of doctors has been asked to look into the information so that the results are accurate and as good as a detailed diagnosis.

“We worked with a team of medical doctors… and experts at Harvard Medical School and Mayo Clinic evaluated related conditions for a representative sample of searches to help improve the lists we show,” said Product Manager Veronica Pinchin.

That said, Google has also put a disclaimer that the data made available to the users should be only considered as information and the patients should always consult doctors for medical advice.

On the days following the launch, Google will record the user feedback and try to improve the database based on it by adding new symptoms and related medical conditions.

Earlier, scientists at Microsoft had analyzed large-scale samples of search engine queries from Bing and found that the keywords used by patients with pancreatic cancer allowed them to diagnose the disease even before a proper medical diagnosis.