Google updates

Google as always is in the news, here's a general update.

Google Health

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.

The service allows the user to add information to his or her Google Health profile, to import health records, to search for doctors or to find online health management tools.

Google Health will also intergrate with appointment and chart viewing applications.

If the health profile is built up by the user, what happens if there is an error?? Is the aim for health professionals to use this as a definate source of reliable information, or is the aim to make sure the patient has their own records of "correct information" for their own peace of mind.

There are two tabs to be seen in Google Health: Profiles and Medical Contacts. The profiles tab has several sub-sections, including “Services and health guide,” “Conditions & symptoms,” “Medications,” “Age, sex, height...” and “Family history.”
A privacy policy at the bottom disclaims that “Any information you enter will remain private. Google will not share it with anyone without your permission.”

This “Conditions & symptoms” dialog includes an auto-completion feature, just like other input boxes in Google Health. You enter “head”, and Google suggests “Head and Neck Angioedema”, “Head Injury”, “Head Pain” and more.

The “Services and health guide” section reads: “Get the most out of Google Health - If your medical providers or pharmacy offer secure downloading of medical records, you can find and add your records to a profile. You can also browse for websites that connect securely to Google Health and provide services for managing your health care.”
Under the headline “Google health guide” this explanation follows: “When you add some information to your profile, Google Health will search trusted medical sources and create a health guide targeted for you. ... Google Health will check for relevant updates to your guide whenever you add new information to the profile.” You can use the health guide, Google writes, to learn about drug interactions, treatments, tests and preventive measures.
A side box warns, “Be sure to discuss questions about your medical care with your doctor or medical provider before making changes,” and a footnote reads, “Built in collaboration with www.safe-med.com”.

The “Allergies” tab. The “Add an Allergy” box suggests “e.g. penicillin.”

You can add a procedure or surgery on this page. As an example, Google provides “appendectomy.”

The “Test results” section. You can add e.g. “cholesterol LDL”.

The “Add an immunication” interface does not allow free-style text input, but restricts you to a selection box instead. Available entries include “Diphtheria, tetanus toxoids, acellular pertussis vaccine (DTaP)” or “Hepatitis A vaccine.”

The “Age, sex, height...” page collects various personal information such as date of birth, gender, ethnicity, blood type, weight, or smoking habits. One of the questions asked is, “Do you drink alcoholic beverages?” Another question is, “Have you smoked more than 20 cigarettes in your lifetime?” Google explains that they ask for your date of birth to “keep your age up to date and show the most relevant guidance.”

The “Family history” dialog lets you add a relative and their respective conditions. The selection box includes entries like “Husband”, “Wife”, “Mother”, “Father”, “Son”, and Google provides the condition example “diabetes.”

On this page, you can “add a doctor”. Our current unnamed sample patient has no medical contacts. You can search the “Google Doctor Directory” to find contacts.

Google Sites

Google has also released Google Sites, a new site publishing service. Based on a scaled back version of JotSpot that Google had acquired 16 months ago for undisclosed terms.

The new service, allows non-technical users to organise and share digital information such as Web links, calendars, photos, videos, presentations, attachments and other documents in an easy-to-maintain site.

"Creating a team website has always been too complicated, requiring dedicated hardware and software as well as programming skills," said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's Enterprise unit, which is aimed at office workers.

The features include

Single-click page creation Creating a new page for your Google Site just takes the click of a button.

No HTML required Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there's no markup language for you to learn -- just get started.

Make it your own Our customization options let you give your Google Site your own look and feel

Get started with templates We offer a growing list of page types -- web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list -- to help you get started with your Google Sites pages.

Upload files and attachments Use the file cabinet to upload files up to 10MB in size. Each Google Apps account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites. Google Apps Premier and Education editions get an additional 500MB for each user account.

Embed rich content Google Sites is integrated with other Google products, so you can insert videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slide shows, and calendars directly onto your Google Sites pages.

Work together and share Our permission settings let you designate owners, viewers and collaborators (meaning they can edit pages) for your site. And you can make your Google Sites available to just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

Google Hacking

Infamous hacking group the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) has published a tool that searches for vulnerabilities and private data using carefully-selected Google search queries.

The process of so-called Google hacking is already well known, largely due to the efforts of Johnny "I Hack Stuff" Long.

We call them 'googledorks': Inept or foolish people as revealed by Google. (Johnny "I Hack Stuff" Long)

http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php

cDc's Goolag Scan allows unskilled hackers or the simply curious to use the same techniques.

http://www.goolag.org/

cDc is most famous for creating Back Orifice remote administration/back door package for Windows ten years ago. It describes Goolag Scanner as a web auditing tool, allowing users to check their own website for vulnerabilities. Searches can be restricted to an individual domain or extended to an entire top-level domain as desired.

Google click rates down



Google click-through rates on its paid search ads are decelerating. As the chart above from Bear Stearns shows, the year-over-year growth of paid clicks on Google in the U.S. went from 37 percent in October to 0.3 percent in January.

Since these are year-over-year numbers, seasonality is accounted for (there are more clicks in the months leading up to Christmas than after, but this January should not be flat with last January).