Over the last year, Google has been expanding its AI overviews in search results, offering responses compiled with generative AI rather than a list of links. The goal, as you would expect, is to make information directly accessible while helping you save time from clicking each link individually and deciding its merit for yourself. Now, Google seems confident these overviews can help you better with your medical queries too.
At its annual health-centric event, The Check Up, Google announced a several ways in which its products will improve how you find information about health-related topics. More specifically, the company said it is now expanding AI overviews in search results “to cover thousands more health topics,” beyond the basic ones such as flu. These results are also being expanded to other languages besides English, including Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, for queries made on mobile.
In addition, Google brings another feature titled “What People Suggest,” which compiles personal advice from forums and public platforms, such as Quora or Reddit, for medical searches. This will be limited to queries made on mobile and only available to users in the U.S. at the moment.
It is vital to emphasize that Google’s AI overviews, like any other generative AI product, are susceptible to incorrect responses — called hallucinations — and must not be used as the sole source of information.
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Using AI to aid medical research
Besides these improvements to Search, Google has also launched its Medical Records API as part of its Health Connect platform. This will allow medical records stored in a specific format to be shared across multiple health and fitness apps on your Android devices.
While AI search results may not fully substitute sound medical advice, Google is expanding access to several lightweight AI models from its Gemma family of models. Google has trained these specific models to help researchers to aid in quicker drug discovery by offering existing knowledge on the effect of certain molecules.
Additionally, Google is also piloting an AI tool called Capricorn that can assist doctors, more specifically pediatric oncologists, to offer personalized treatments to young cancer patients at a hospital in the Netherlands.