Web 2.0 Summit: Google’s Marissa Mayer
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 17, 2007 at 3:42 PM PT
It is Google’s vision that these two core capabilities–reliable, unambiguous, computable medical data and safe systems for trust and authentication and controlled access–will dovetail with the consumer needs for discovery about everything in their health arena. As this rolls out and consumers truly can discover what is the state of the art and what they should know about their treatments, where they are being treated, how they are being treated and how they will manage their diseases or recovery, this consumer awareness will lead to far greater consumer control, far better health data and, inevitably, to a very different health world than the current one.”
Google’s mission, as you’ve likely heard, is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And let’s face it: in what area of our lives is the world’s information more disorganized, inaccessible and useless than health care?
It’s nice to hear, then, that Google’s long-expected health initiative is set to go live in early 2008. Noting the incredible rate at which the health industry generates data (two billion X-rays per year, 200 petabytes of data), Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said Google is developing a prototype online platform that will organize it. “If you look at health care, there’s already a huge user need, people are already using Google more than any other tool on the Web to find health information,” Mayer said. “And the health-care industry generates a huge amount of information every year. It’s a natural core competency for us, to understand how to organize all that data.”
Beyond that, Mayer had little else to offer but a schtick-in-need-of-a-laugh-track “Top 10 List of Things You Might See From Google Health.” Among them, Google paternity search, Viagra spam for Gmail users who truly need it, and an “I’m feeling yucky” button.
