As I mentioned in my December 30, 2005 post, Podcast May Be the Word of the Year, But Google Has Changed Medicine, people are turning to Google to do medical research. The New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective article, Searching for the Right Search - Reaching the Medical Literature (Jan. 5, 2005, v. 354: 4-7 not free online). In this article Robert Steinbrook discusses how rapidly Google has become the primary research source for finding medical articles. Steinbrook points to data compiled by High Wire Press, that Google provided the majority of referrals to articles in HighWire (56.4%). In fact, PubMed only accounted for 8.7% of the referrals to HighWire articles.

While the number of searches conducted in PubMed has increaded to about 70 million/month, there is also an increase in number of people who are referred to PubMed citations and abstracts through Google searches.

So, like it or not, we are in a Google searching world.