TechinAsia has tackled one of the hottest debates of the year: Is Google the cause of medical misinformation, or the solution to it? I was happy to contribute my own thoughts with the maddening response of, “It depends.” So much depends on unique circumstances, and certainly if you depend on wrong medical information the consequences can be deadly. Of course there are laws about the kind of content you produce online, but in many cases content marketers and writers might not even know what these rules are.
The article points out that in a recent survey, 77 percent of Americans admit to going online for help with diagnoses. However, search is a pretty complicated beast in any industry—and that includes medical. Studies have shown that many people don’t look beyond the first handful of Google results, which can be detrimental when these users are looking for answers to sometimes serious medical queries.
Content marketers/writers usually don’t have medical backgrounds, so what does that mean for medical searches? Google is coming to the rescue with the 2015 Knowledge Graphs, which require MDs to provide information.
Find out more about what’s in store for medical searches here:
