Will Google Make the Doctor Obsolete?

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BMJ 2005;331:1487-1488 (24 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1487

Editorial

How Google is changing medicine

A medical portal is the logical next step

What a remarkable year it has been for those of us monitoring changes

in the global information landscape. Since last Christmas, there has

been a flurry of activity: the digitisation of the world's libraries

began in earnest (despite the copyright fracas); open access

publishing gained much-needed support internationally (especially in

science and medicine); and Google, MSN Search, and introduced a

number of customisation tools for desktops and mobiles, podcasts,

blogs, and video searches.1 2

Google's influence and power is writ large in the search field—so

large that librarians are asking themselves some difficult questions.

With all of this technology and freely available digital information,

what will happen to physical libraries? Google's mission is to

provide access to the world's information—but this is librarians'

mission too. Will they be needed in the new information age?3

For all the benefits technology provides, it does provoke anxiety. In

a recent letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, a New York

rheumatologist describes a scene at rounds where a professor asked

the presenting fellow to explain how he arrived at his diagnosis.4

Matter of factly, the reply came: " I entered the salient features

into Google, and [the diagnosis] popped right up. " The attending

doctor was taken aback by the Google diagnosis. " Are we physicians no

longer needed? Is an observer who can accurately select the findings

to be entered in a Google search all we need for a diagnosis to

appear—as if by magic? " In a post-Google world, where evidence based

education is headed is anyone's guess.5 Googling your diagnosis;

Googling your treatment—where is all this leading us?

Google has won the battle of the search engines, at least for the

time being (see example in table), and its more serious minded

offspring, Google Scholar, is rapidly gaining ground. Within a year

of its release Google Scholar has led more visitors to many

biomedical journal websites than has PubMed (J Sack, personal

communication, 2005). Once they discover it, many medical students

and doctors prefer Google Scholar.6 Although both tools benefit from

Google's trademark simplicity, Google Scholar indexes more peer

reviewed research and is especially quick in locating highly cited

items and the proverbial needle in a haystack. Doctors are encouraged

to consult Google Scholar for browsing and serendipitous discovery,

not for literature reviews; and they should use the advanced search

page to find words and names that occur often in the medical

literature.

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http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7531/1487?etoc