See how social feedback can encourage change

April 6 2010, 8:28am

Search engines such as Google are making a regular appearance in a person’s everyday use of the Internet and are exactly the reason more brands need to solicit ideas and employ listening services. More and more participants are making use of the informational gatekeeper including a few troubling terms which has the search giant making some changes. Last week Google search engine started automatically giving a suggestion of where to call after receiving a search seemingly focused on suicide. A toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline takes precedence over the linked results and is different and more prominent than an advertisement. The idea which was suggested internally came from a similar change that Google made a few months ago to provide a phone number for the national poison control hotline through a user’s feedback. “A mother wrote in a suggestion to us — her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control,” said Dr. Roni Zeiger, chief health strategist for Google. “Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control.” Unfortunately search engines are not the omniscient beings we wish they were and therefore cannot read the mind of the person making the inquiry. Not all searches will elicit the suicide warning, in fact I tried several that took me straight to a variety of top ways to kill yourself. Google prides itself on giving users the exact information they are searching for and thus this presents a bit of problem anyway. Functions such as Google Suggest act as a sort of guide using an algorithm to anticipate the desired search based on the first words typed into the search box. “We looked at many of the possible queries that could reflect interest in the topic,” Dr. Zeiger said about Google’s efforts. “We are starting relatively conservatively.”