SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc aims to apply Web search technology to a general set of health information problems and remains committed to the market despite slow initial progress, an executive said on Wednesday.
"We do have a broad interest in this area," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of Search Products & User Experience, told Internet industry leaders at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. "It will start with search."
Mayer said engineers stumbled onto Google's potential role in the field by noticing the number of searches users perform with its Web search services for hard-to-diagnose health problems, often simply by typing symptoms into a Web browser.
"Google is not a doctor, but people come to us with a lot of health information searches," Mayer told the audience of several hundred executives, financiers and writers. "There is a big user information need, which we should ultimately fill."
Source
For more info: REUTERS
Thu Oct 18, 2007 8:48am EDT, By Eric Auchard
