By Tom Corwin
Science and medicine reporter
The Augusta Chronicle
Katherine Leon has a problem with SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. Leon has her own SCAD – spontaneous coronary artery dissection, a rare and sudden event where the inner lining of the artery peels away and the result can be a heart attack and death. Leon has been fighting to create more awareness about the disease, which she is convinced is underdiagnosed. But every time someone looks up SCAD on Google, the first results are almost always that other SCAD.
So on Thursday, in a panel called “Google tools for health reporters at the Health Journalism 2012 conference, she pleaded with Sandra Heikkinen of Google: Can’t you do something about that other SCAD. Heikkinen’s response? Put a minus sign before Savannah and it eliminates results with that word in it.
That search tip and others were part of the panel on Google as Heikkinen extolled different tools for health journalists to explore the world that is Google. She used the minus sign herself recently when she was looking up cruise options for her mother.
“Putting a minus sign before Tom? Quite helpful,” Heikkinen said. The plus sign also works but in the opposite way. An asterisk fills in for missing information, such as “* was the fifth president of the United States” Heikkinen said. “It’s a really good tool when you can’t think of the word for something.”
Google is a good source for images and you can search by rights status to find images that are free to use. Google Labs Similar Images also allows you to find something just a little bit different.
Google Trends and Hot Trends, updated every hour, can give an idea of not only what people were searching for but the news behind it. Its Flu Trends, based on where and how much people are searching flu-related topics, is helping Google work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on figuring out where outbreaks might be occurring, Heikkinen said.
Google Insights for Search allows a number of different ways of analyzing what, where and when people are searching for.
“It’s a more robust and sophisticated version of Hot Trends,” Heikkinen said. It allows you to not only look at what people are searching for in particular cities or states but also by what time of the year they are doing it, which might alert you to do your annual allergy story earlier in the year, for instance. Google also has mobile apps that allow you to for instance take a picture of a building and have Google identify it for you.
But of course there are always the privacy concerns, like the one expressed by Kelley Weiss of the Center for Health Reporting at the Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.
If she is out using her Google mobile app, Weiss asked, “Is it tracking me on my cell phone?” as the audience broke out in laughter.
No, Heikkinen said. Google also gets questioned about whether it is all robots working around the clock or if there are real human beings there, Heikkinen said.
“We get that a lot,” she said. “We definitely have real people working at Google.”
