Google Answers Your Health Questions With Health OneBox
Aug 27, 2009 at 12:00pm ET by Barry Schwartz
Google launched Google Health back in February 2008. Today, Google is integrating Google Health content into the search results via the classic OneBox section of the page. You should be able to see the Google Health OneBox for medical related searches, such as for [asthma] or [diabetes].
Here is a screen capture of the OneBox result for Asthma:
As you can see, Google provides a quick definition of the condition and then gives you a link to either Google Health, Mayo Clinic, Medline Plus or WebMD. Note, not all of these links will be available for all health-related queries.
I asked Roni Zeiger, the product manager for Google Health, about monetization of Google Health. He told me it is about getting the answer as quickly as possible to the searcher. They have no current plans or even future plans to add ads to the Google Health property.
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This seems like a moderately big deal. Google just elected to put their content as the first result, even though it’s unoriginal content that dozens of sites have licensed, including one of their other quick links, Medline Plus.
People freaked out about Knols, thinking that Google was getting into the publishing business, and would quickly succumb to the temptation of boosting their results higher. Knols fizzled and that didn’t happen, but it happened quite suddenly with Google Health. Using this as a model, there’s no reason Google couldn’t license bodies of content and immediately boost themselves to the top.
How does this not damage their claim that they organize, rather than build content? Or that their algorithm is responsible for ranking results rather than which partners or content they want to promote?