1. Home>
2. Specialties>
3. General Medicine>
4. Summary and Comment

Google: Another Way to Search for a Diagnosis

The search engine identified the correct disease more than half of the time.

Anecdotes about physicians who made successful diagnoses of unusual diseases after entering symptoms into the Google search engine led these Australian investigators to test Google’s diagnostic savvy.

The investigators first selected 26 patient vignettes from case records published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Next, while blind to the actual diagnosis, they entered three to five search terms per case into Google. They then reviewed the first 30 returned documents to identify the three most prominent diagnoses and compared them with the actual diagnosis. The Google search produced correct diagnostic documents for 15 of the 26 cases (58%).

Comment: Two physicians generated these results in a process akin to an "expert" search. Because this search engine is free, it represents yet another diagnostic aid for physicians and their patients. However, close inspection of the search terms — provided in an online table — suggests that correct diagnoses were generated in easy cases but missed in difficult cases. For example, searching on "acute aortic regurgitation + abscess" correctly suggested the obvious diagnosis of infective endocarditis, but searching on "fever + bilateral thigh pain + weakness" failed to yield the difficult diagnosis of ehrlichiosis. At the time of publication, the full text of the original article was available free of charge.

— Keith I. Marton, MD

Published in Journal Watch General Medicine December 26, 2006

Citation(s):

Tang H and Ng JHK. Googling for a diagnosis — Use of Google as a diagnostic aid: Internet based study. BMJ 2006 Dec 2; 333:1143-5.

• Original article (Subscription may be required)
• Medline abstract (Free)