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Health care information matters
November 30, 2006
Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President
At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases:
What was wrong -- it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms
Who should treat her -- there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her
Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred
Once she had a correct diagnosis and we'd found the right doctor, her treatment was excellent. But before and after treatment, most people with serious illnesses have to live through these other phases and suffer similar problems. She was trying to get help from her caregivers in the family and it was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn't well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others.
In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the
Google Co-op
platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.
This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient's needs.
Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.
As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don't know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too.
These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google. We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you're an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we'd love to hear from you.
Read through our Help Center information and let us hear from you.
Update:
New contact link.
Revisions and publishing features in spreadsheets
November 29, 2006
Posted by Micah Lemonik, Software Engineer
Running out for ice cream and cookies at 2 a.m. was just a cliché to me -- until I found myself trying to find an all night grocery store which had these things for my pregnant wife, Marla. Then there were the nights she didn't know what she wanted, but if she didn't get it
now
, things would get ugly.
How did a
Google spreadsheet
help with pregnant-lady-cravings? She and I started a list of every food she'd ever craved and when, and, using the sharing and collaboration features, we were able to create a spreadsheet that helped me learn what foods were best to keep on hand in bulk for those midnight feedings. We could even keep an inventory so I'd know to stop off at the grocery store on my way home if we were low on vanilla ice cream, cookies or peanut butter.
My wife isn't the only one making requests at 2 a.m. Lots of you are sending in lots of requests for features at all hours of the day and night. Two new ones launched today are revisions and and publishing. Revisions will enable you to go back to previous versions of your spreadsheet; publishing will give you a URL for your spreadsheets which you can share with anyone -- even as a link on another site or in your blog. The spreadsheet can still be updated from within Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
We've got some other cool new features too, so check them out at
docs.google.com
,and if you have other "crazy" ideas, feel free to
make suggestions
,
discuss them with others
, or visit the
Help Center
. Whatever you do, please don't ask for ice cream at 2 a.m.!
Adieu to Google Answers
November 28, 2006
Posted by Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, Software Engineers
Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time -- and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in
Google Answers
, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds.
Google Answers taught us exactly
how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline
,
why flies survive a good microwaving
, and
why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner
. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that
our building might be on fire
.
The people who participated in Google Answers -- more than 800 of them over the years -- are a passionate group committed to helping people find the information they need, and we applaud them for sharing their incredible knowledge with everyone who wrote in.
If you have a chance, we encourage you to browse through the questions posted over the last 4+ years. Although we won't be accepting any new questions, the existing Qs and As are available. We'll stop accepting new Answers to questions by the end of the year.
Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.
Audio captchas when visual images are unusable
November 28, 2006
Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist
From time to time, our own
T.V. Raman
shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.
Wikipedia defines 'captcha'
as an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" -- a word which is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. Most web users think of captchas as those hard to read distorted letters or images that one often is confronted by when websites attempt to verify that they're indeed talking to a live human. Google Accounts support captchas. Of course, bloggers (no matter which platform they use) can also use them to prevent comment spam.
Captchas were never intended to be purely visual -- however, most initial implementations used fuzzy images, and in attempting to lock out automated agents also inadvertently locked out people unable to see the image. As an alternative to these, this past spring
Google Services that require verification began to provide an audio alternative
-- people have the option of listening to a sequence of spoken digits that they then type into a form field to verify to the web application that there is indeed a live human at the other end.
To keep the audio captcha as challenging as the visual captcha when confronted by automated agents, we add some distortion to the spoken digits, and we're still experimenting with different distortion techniques to ease the burden on the genuine human user while locking out automated agents.
We welcome feedback
on the effectiveness of these techniques from you (we automatically collect feedback from those evil automated agents pretending to be human) :-).
You can easily spot the availability of audio captchas by the presence of the well-recognized "wheelchair" icon for accessibility --- the image is tagged with appropriate
alt
text to help blind users. Incidentally you don’t have to be visually impaired to use the audio captcha; if you are in a situation where you find it hard to view the visual captcha -- either because you're at a non-graphical display, or because the specific visual challenge we offered you turned out to be unusable in a given situation, feel free to give the audio captcha a try. We've worked hard to ensure that the audio captchas work on different hardware/software combinations, and you do not need any special hardware (or software) other than a sound card to be able to use them.
Update: Global Warming Speakout
November 27, 2006
Posted by Jen Mazzon, Google Docs & Spreadsheets Team
Hundreds of students from more than 20 countries recently brainstormed ideas on combating climate change -- and they did it online using
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
. The kids had a blast coming up with solutions to address climate change, and we had a blast reading through their ideas and selecting the
top 50
to feature on the
Google Educators
site. Then to top it off we took out out a full-page ad in today's edition of
USA Today
so the kids' great ideas would get noticed! Global collaboration has never been more fun and, when it comes to global warming, more necessary.
Pick up a copy of
USA Today
to see the full-page ad that credits the 80+ participating schools or
click here to read all the "top 50" ideas
. You'll definitely find an idea that you can act on.
Happy Cyber Monday
November 27, 2006
Posted by Tom Oliveri, Google Checkout team
You've heard of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when it seems everyone in the U.S. crowds into the malls to get an early start on the annual holiday shopping frenzy. But have you heard of
Cyber Monday
, the first workday after the long weekend -- in other words, today -- when we all sit down at our desks and start surfing our way to those perfect gifts?
According to
a poll we recently commissioned
from Harris Interactive, 40 percent of employed U.S. adults say they plan to do at least some of their online holiday shopping from work this year. So we aim to make all that pointing and clicking as fast, safe, and easy as possible. Shopping with
Google Checkout
means using one user name, password and account to make purchases from
thousands of merchants
. It means
serious protection
from online fraud. And this holiday season it also means a nice bonus for your gift-buying budget; as a small holiday gift to all Checkout shoppers, you'll receive $10 off purchases of $30 or more, or $20 off purchases of $50 or more, depending on the merchant.
And just in time for the holidays, we're also happy to announce a growing number of merchants who recently added Checkout to their sites, including Toys R Us, Babies R Us, Golfsmith, Linens 'n Things, PetCo, and J&R Music and Computer World.
So settle in, log on, answer a few work-related emails (so you won't feel too guilty), and jumpstart your shopping season with Checkout. Learn more about Google Checkout holiday offers
here
.
So Cal without cars?
November 22, 2006
Posted by Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager Transit
My previous trips to Southern California have required cars and involved a lot of traffic on the 405. Next time, however, I'll be using Google Transit to plan bus trips with Burbank Bus and the Orange County Transportation Authority. While they can't make the traffic disappear, I can relax as I travel between my
favorite beaches
or maybe
from Bob Hope Airport to beautiful downtown Burbank
.
The interest in
open sharing and standards
for transit data is growing. If you'd like your city to be a part of Google Transit, email us at
labs-transit_content@google.com
.
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