A key part of the vision for the NHS website involves adapting our publicly available content for new technologies, channels and platforms. This gives people easier access to trusted, clinically assured information however they choose to search. Getting NHS information in Google knowledge panels is one of the first examples of this new approach in action.
Google knowledge panels
You’ve probably noticed that for some Google searches using your mobile – for example, about an actor or film – you get a section at the top of your results with a summary of information from sources like Wikipedia or IMDB.
This is what Google call a 'knowledge panel'.
These panels have been used for a range of topics for a while now, but in the UK they had never been used for health information.
From this week, thanks to the hard work of the team, anyone who searches Google on a mobile device can find knowledge panels with reliable and authoritative health information on more than 250 conditions from the NHS website. This can help more people learn about common conditions, symptoms and treatments more quickly and easily than ever before.
We also created short content summaries (up to 150 characters) to accompany each section we’d marked up.
During this work, we’ve helped develop a new open Schema.org standard for marking-up health information (called HealthTopicContent), which will make it easier for others to correctly mark-up their health content.
This means we’re now in a much better position to roll out modularisation more widely and move towards it being a routine part of content production.
