Reports surfaced last week that Google will announce a health product on Wednesday May 10. In preparation for the announcement, I took a look at the amount of traffic Google is currently driving to Health & Medical sites in comparison to other search engines.
Hitwise clickstream data shows that for the month of April 2006, 2.67% of Google’s downstream traffic went to sites in the Health & Medical category. Yahoo! Search sent 2.43% of its traffic to this category, while MSN Search sent 1.97%, which shows that Health is a smart vertical initiative for Google. Following is a list of the top Health & Medical sites visited after Google in April 2006. We see that the US National Library of Medicine and WebMD are the leading sites receiving traffic from Google, which may provide clues as to where Google will get its content from. It’s interesting to note that Yahoo! Health is the fourth most popular Health & Medical website receiving visits from Yahoo! Search, and MSN Health ranks number 5 in MSN Search’s Health & Medical downstream, which shows that having a vertical content site does not guarantee that it will lead in receiving search traffic.

It seems to me that Google’s vertical strategy at present is more about enhancing the search experience than building a destination content site. I suspect that this health initiative may be more like the enhanced music results launched last December. In April 2006, Google sent 2.75% of its downstream traffic to sites in the Music category, up slightly from 2.46% in April 2005, showing that improving the search experience is more about getting the searcher to the most relevant content outside Google rather than keeping him/her there, which drives value for Google’s advertisers and searchers alike.
Google’s non-search initiatives to date have not become category leaders, although most have high rankings within their verticals. The table below shows the Top 5 Google properties by market share of visits and their respective vertical rankings. Google Finance, at less than two months after launch, ranked at number 43 in the Business Information category for the week ending May 4, 2006. This shows how much time it can take to change consumer behavior, unless the product is highly differentiated from competitors, as in the case of Google Maps when it launched satellite views, immediately sending it to number 3 in the Maps category.