Google’s “Refine Results for…” Links

In Google Health, a first look, Marissa Mayer provides an overview of what Google Health is all about:

“Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.”

Maybe I am a bit behind - EDIT: I was way behind! - but I have noticed that Google is returning a custom “Refine Results for…” box above the natural results for practically every disease and condition I could think of, including: flu, cold, diabetes etc.

Asbestosis refine results box in Google UK

This, of course, is different to the “Searches related to:” box that often appears at the bottom of the Google’s results page for more generic search terms.

Each of these new “Refine results” links uses a Google Search Operator: “:more”. Here’s an example of clicking on the “Symptoms” link. Note that the box returns further options once this is clicked:

Asbestosis

I wonder if these results are completely algorithmic? It seems that authority participants can label pages, whether this adds relevance to the link or not, I don’t know. In this case, HON (Health On The Net Foundation) and HMS (Harvard Medical School) have labeled the #1 refined by symptoms result for “asbestosis”.

As the medical field is such a sensitive one, with high risks associated with misdiagnosis, it does seem that Google has addressed this as an unusually high quality and authority set of results is being returned for refined queries.

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5 March 2008 | Google, Search | Comments

2 Responses to “Google’s “Refine Results for…” Links”

  1. 1 rishil 5 March 2008 @ 5:31 pm

    These are sort of tag based - and as a result of google annotations as part of the the google CSE, and the “Google Marker” tool.

    I think the results are based on Googles normal algo, but showing the annotated sites first - I have gotten quite a few clients annotated and in these results, but using the right keywords and phrases can get you on the results as well.

  2. 2 Neil 6 March 2008 @ 9:39 am

    Cheers for the comment Rishil. I noticed non-annotated sites appearing above annotated sites too, so maybe it’s a mix of both. The only reason I typed medical conditions into Google was because I’ve recently taken on a personal injury client. Did not realise this has been around for a long time already. Nifty feature though nonetheless.

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