google as diagnostic tool

Google as a diagnostic tool?

I found an article on BBC News titled, "Google aids doctors'

diagnoses". Apparently, a team of doctors down under in Australia had

nothing better to do with their expertly trained minds than plug

symptoms into the google search engine to see if it would deliver the

right diagnosis. This was done on 26 cases for the results of a study

that would appear in the new england journal of medicine. According to

the doctor who lead the team, google could be a "useful aid" for

diagnosing medical conditions. Here's the punchline: google searches

found the correct diagnosis in about half of the cases. Personally, I

don't find 50 percent accuracy that intriguing. Particularly when the

"diagnostic tool" in question is a search engine. Most people don't

realize this, of course, but very often the results that are found on

search engines are found because website operators have tried very

hard to get their sites to appear high up in the search results. This

is, of course, human nature. It's called competition. And the

competition gets really intense when advertising dollars are involved.

These days, advertising dollars are pretty much what the web is about.

So, what's my point? Simply this. Just because you find a website on a

search engine's first page of results doesn't mean that the site is

the best source of information. It may simply be there because the

operator of the site was more successful in getting the site ranked.

Also, and this is wise advice for any medium, virtual or actual: don't

believe everything that you read.

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