According to USA Today's Kevin Maney, Google may be set to announce a new service, Google Health, next Wednesday at the annual Google Press Day.
Google Health would be a vertical search engine covering the healthcare industry. It would make a lot of sense. After Finance (and sex, of course), health information is among the most frequently searched for information on the web.
Vertical search is certainly a concept whose time has come. While users can try to use tagging and technology to try to filter and organize results, searching a predefined set of sites is a clean way to ensure you get the results you need. For information such as health care data, limiting the sites to those from "trusted sources" can be even more critical.
It will be interesting to see how Google Health compares to editorially-driven sites focused on aggregating health care. Sites such as WebMD, Healthline and other publishers are compelling and offer community as well as information. It will be interesting to see how Google develops an appealing solution for consumer healthcare information.
There is a good round-up of the best of the Google Health speculation as well as a preview of the Google Health functionality (including links and screenshots) over at Nursing Informatics Online @ http://www.informaticsnurse.com
The direct link to the thread is: http://www.informaticsnurse.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12328
Posted by: Torqued | May 09, 2006 at 09:47 AM