Dr. Google, M.D.

Something occured to me today. Like all good hypocondriacs, I spend an inordinate amount of time on google looking for my symptoms du jour. And as I've noted previously, any search of google turns up one of three things:

1. Death
2. Sudden Death
3. Slow Painful Death

I don't know why this just occured to me but let me give a hypothesis.

Thesis: Google is garaunteed (by design) to make you think you are dying.

Abstract: Any search of google on medical symptoms will return as a top choice a dreaded and usually fatal disease. The usefulness of these results will be inversely proportional to their pagerank and directly proportional to their ability to freak you the hell out.

Hypothesis #1: Hypochondriacs (hereby refered to as 'nut cases') are programmed to seek out confirmation that their physical symptoms are those of a deadly or debilitating disease. Said nut cases will also bypass dozens of other links describing benign illnesses on reputable sites and will instead find the most deadly illnesses on most outdated sites available.

Hypothesis #2: Google's 'magic' is based on the fact that the more you click on a link the higher it will return in the next search.

Therefore, the more nut cases search google for diseases, the more bad crap they'll find. This will result in even more searches ad infinitum (or absurdum).

What we need is a search engine where healthy people search for our symptoms for us and then give us advice and maybe tell us some sort of supplement or action we could take to alleviate said symptom.

Man, that sounds really familiar.