Diagnosis using search engines

doi:10.1136/bmj.39044.369745.BE

BMJ 2006;333:1131 (2 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.39044.369745.BE

Editorials

Diagnosis using search engines

Probably heralds a much more sophisticated web resource

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Thousands of computer systems targeted at medicaldiagnosis (often described as expert systems) have been developedduring the past 50 years. Most have had relatively little impacton day to day clinical practice; for example, because they arenot easily accessible at the point of care; have a complex interface;can deal with only a narrow focus (one symptom or clinical problem);are not integrated with clinical information systems; dependon particular software or hardware platforms; or require labourintensive construction and are therefore expensive to maintainand extend.

In this week's BMJ a study by Tang and Ng assessesthe effectiveness of a web search engine (Google) as a diagnosticaid.¹ Using general purpose web search engines as a diagnosticaid is new, although using computers to aid diagnosis is not.The article has provoked a widespread response, with one dailynewspaper concluding that "Researchers have found that a . . . [Full text of this article]

Martin Gardner, research fellow (martin@dcs.gla.ac.uk)

¹ Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ

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