Google asks health professionals for site advice

The world's most popular search engine says doctors and others can submit Web pages they believe should be ranked highly in its results.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. June 5, 2006.

Google Inc., the king of online search, is inviting physicians, as well as health care organizations, to improve the quality and reliability of health Web-site searching through a new product called Google Co-op it rolled out May 17 for beta testing.

Under the new service, the medical community could contribute or submit Web pages to Google they consider to be authoritative and credible. Those contributors would create links to those pages and enable online searchers to more quickly find their content. Thus, when searchers run a health search on Google, results from those contributors will be at the top of the results page, said Shashi Seth, a product manager for Google Co-op.

Based on how many people subscribe to the contributors' links, Google then would determine whether the contributors would be added to its Google Co-op directory using its automatic ranking algorithms. If contributors fail to crack the directory, then no one will see the content they submitted, Seth said. Google Co-op isn't a search engine itself, but a program within Google that helps delivers better, faster results for those who use Google's search engine.

Essentially, Google is using the expertise of contributors in a particular field such as medicine, and having searchers validate their expertise to refine and improve its search service. At press time, the enhanced search service is available only for the topics of health and travel. More topics will be added later, Seth said.