Yesterday while at swimming up and down the pool at swim practice, I began to think more and more about Google Health Co-op.

First let me say that I am not anti-Google. I like using Google, I find it helpful. I also like tagging and think it is an interesting method of organization. But I just can not wrap my brain around the idea of how Google Health Co-op can be a good idea. I don't understand how using a free text uncontrolled vocabulary can be used effectively to categorize or "recommend" good medical/health sites. I think Dean Giustini expressed my thoughts best when he said, "It's one thing to use social tagging for automobiles, and stereos - but for health? Even consumers are advised to use more targeted search techniques and best content websites."

Thinking about Google Co-op and the fact that I had finished warm up and was working on a long 1500 yd. set led me to think about Google and all its Googlettes. We have Google Print (now Google Book Search), Google Scholar, Google Co-op, and Google Images. I use all of these baby googles (except for Co-op since it just came out this week) at work to find information for my doctors, and there still is the true Google Health which SearchEngineWatch says has yet to be released. I almost need a meta search engine to search all of the Googlettes....Oh wait would that be Google?

The big thing many of our users want right now are meta search engines that will search the library catalog, MEDLINE, other databases, online journals, open access respositories, and their high school locker from 1973, all in one fell swoop. They want one stop shopping at its finest. However, Google is busy creating specialty search engines to which even I (an information professional) sometimes find hard to see the relationship links. For example, I have already searched Medline and all of the other wonderful online medical databases, but I haven't found the right bit of information I need on a specific rare condition. Do I jump right into Google Scholar to see if a paper/abstract/cuniform scroll has been written on it? Or do jump into plain Google? I usually end up doing both. Why? Because I want to make sure I cover all the bases and Google hasn't given us a clear idea of any possibly overlaps or links of information between it and the Googlettes.

So my question: Is Google diluting itself too much by offering all of their subspecialty search engines?