Google on Tuesday announced that it has begun showing pharmaceutical drug side effects and other drug facts and information directly on its search resutls pages. Google also cautioned users not to rely solely on it or the information presented for medical advice. As Google wrote in a post on its official company Google Plus Page:.
For instance, if you search for [acetaminophen] you’ll see a panel on the right side of the search results that offers details such as side effects, brand names and links to further resources. While we hope you find these results useful, they do not act as medical advice and remember that you should always consult a doctor if you have a medical concern.
Here’s a screenshot of the new feature Google published in its post Tuesday:
The move is part of an expansion of Google’s Knowledge Graph, a collection of data about famous people and objects that Google has gleaned from Web sources and displays directly to users on its search results pages, instead of having users click through to the source pages that contain that information. In the case of the drug facts, Google appears to rely on a variety of sources, such as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website DailyMed.
