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Comment by thotpoizn | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this function is needed if the search engine performs its purpose. Shouldn't searching on any of those symptoms return results that suggest the possibility of pancreatic cancer? As designed, it returns those results to the very person with the most vested interest in both the results and their own privacy.

How is this project anything more than "other people snooping around in my search queries," or any better than simply tuning the search engine to highlight those results more if they are believed under-represented?

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Looking up any symptoms at all on the web is pretty much the worst possible thing a health anxiety sufferer can do.

As it is, nearly any symptom you put in will bring up the possibility of cancer, so it’s all just noise.

Being able to connect disparate symptoms that the patients don’t connect themselves is a good thing.

Snooping on searches isn’t necessarily the greatest way of achieving that given all the privacy implications, but it may be reasonably effective.

It could find correlations based on search that were previously unknown. Imagine a world where the link between tobacco and cancer isn't known: perhaps it emerges that there's a correlation of people 10 years before searching for cancer also searching of where to buy cigarettes.

I think it's interesting that this research can happen.

Well, I admit that does sound like a promising concept, but it's not quite the same one described in the article. By my reading, this project seems oriented more towards correlating some number of searches and connecting the dots in a present-tense, Clippy "Your search patterns indicate you might have pancreatic cancer. Can I show you patient reviews of several good Oncologists in your area?" - sort of way.

That seems rather different than "Hey, 10 years ago you searched on some stuff that indicated you might have had pancreatic cancer. Sorry we didn't catch it sooner, since the 10 year survival rate is below 5%..."

To be clear, either one seems potentially quite cool and interesting. But if someone else besides me and Clippy are privy to these results - unless I explicitly shared them - then it seems a little creepy.

In retrospect, I suppose I wouldn't be too terribly offended if I died already, but my results were later able to help prevent someone else's untimely demise...

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