Yesterday it was expected that Google would announce the launch of Google Health, but it announced the launch of Google Co-op (beta) instead. Google Co-op is a community of users who contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone. So where did Google Health go? According to SearchEngineWatch Google says a "more full-fledged Google Health is comming," and that Google doesn't consider the Health topic in Google Co-op to be the Google Health. "This is Google making a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging."

Both SearchEngineWatch and Google Blogoscoped have good articles on Google Co-op.

Google Health Co-op looks to be interesting. The Health Co-op has enlisted the help of medical professionals to tag the urls or web sites they feel are helpful and reputable. It appears to be similar to the tagging people are doing with del.icio.us, only it is for Google. According to Enoch Choi, an individual contributor to Google Health Co-op, "The work I'm doing with Google Co-op involves helping make a list of the URL (universal resource locator, the web address) of websites to improve health-related searches. These labels will appear at the top of Google search results for search queries regarding any health related term..."

For those unfamiliar with folksonomy (social tagging)....
According to Wikipedia:
"A 'folksonomy' is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. The freely chosen labels (called tags) help to improve search engine's effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary. The labeling process is called tagging. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us."

Basically it is similar to cataloging web pages for the masses, but instead of a librarian cataloging the pages, the users catalog (tag) the pages using their own terms. Users are no longer tied to the strict controlled vocabularies which most didn't know about or fully understand, they use terms that have meaning to them. However, unlike a controlled vocabulary, these social tags are prone to problems with polysemes, synonyms, and meta noise.

Social tagging is very popular but I haven't seen it being used on as large of scale in medicine as Google Health Co-op plans to do to. Will it work for medicine? Will it muddy the waters? What are your thoughts on folksonomy (tagging) and medical sites? And will Google Health Co-op be popular and helpful?

I have to mull this over some, more thoughts tomorrow.