Although Google substantially supports most of its revenue on advertising, it cannot fail to keep the market in which it is going to draw healthy and clean. This is why, with a new update, the group has traced a new limit beyond which customers will not be able to go, especially in the area of ​​”health and drugs“.

Google, limits on biomedical advertising

When a user searches on Google, he is confronted on the SERP by a mixture of results and advertising: the logic with which the page is constructed is such that we consider advertising in some way related to the word we are looking for, since it is precisely on this logic which is based on the group’s advertising offer. Every single advertisement therefore includes a share of responsibility on Google’s part and ignoring this aspect is now equivalent to hiding one’s head in the sand. So he does not want to be a search engine, which with an acknowledgment of the situation wanted instead to block any residual tolerance and carry out a new policy and new limits on the biomedical world.

The rules ( see policy ) prohibit the sale of advertising for services, products and theorems that are not based on scientific basis. Any treatment that does not have sufficient clinical scientific support, in short, will not reach the masses: scientific validation becomes an objective limit beyond which any para-science cannot reach.

The importance of a new policy

This is a change of great importance since the theme of health implies the treatment of a highly sensitive area. The researches involved in the policy changes are in fact often linked to health problems, thus involving users in a particular psycho-physical situation. The click aptitude can easily lead into the arms of pseudo-scientists, pseudo-medicals, scammers, alchemists of the miraculous cure and placebo sellers.

Not only: when a new drug or a new cure is still in the experimental field, it makes little sense to sell among the masses, without the intermediation of doctors and without the necessary awareness of risks and opportunities: the new policy therefore also regulates that gray area of ​​experimental science, where new treatments are being tested for validation that allows mass use.

A worthy intervention by Google, therefore, and the hope is that it can also reach competitors like Facebook: too often advertising is stuffed with advertising of this type, where miraculous diets and amazing drugs promise unexpected healings. Leveraging on the desperation of others is something unspeakable and the platforms can no longer avoid putting a brake on drifts of this type. In fact, the objective co-responsibility of those who convey these types of announcements is overt and too cumbersome to be ignored.

Homeopathy

A curiosity remains pending: how will homeopathy be judged? Will the studies that prove its total ineffectiveness be sufficient to prohibit advertising on Google? This aspect will have to be verified over time. To date an extemporaneous verification does not yet seem to block advertising on this theme, where in all probability a concrete and visible limit will be established between what is science and what is not, between what is tolerated and what is not, between what is part of the compromise and what is hopelessly out of it.