‘Suicide’ Query Prompts Google to Offer Hotline
As with any omniscient being, you can ask Google anything. You just don’t know what the answer is going to be.
That changed slightly last week when the Google search engine started automatically giving a suggestion of where to call after receiving a search seemingly focused on suicide.
Among the searches that result in an icon of a red phone and the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline are “ways to commit suicide” and “suicidal thoughts.” The information takes precedence over the linked results and is different and more prominent than an advertisement. Guidance on suicide prevention was suggested internally and was put in place on Wednesday.
This is only the second time Google has added such guidance on troubling search terms, Dr. Roni Zeiger, chief health strategist for Google, said in an interview. A few months ago, the search engine began providing a phone number for the national poison control hotline after searches like “poison emergency.”
He said the idea came from a Google user.
“A mother wrote in a suggestion to us — her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control,” Dr. Zeiger said. “Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control.”
“That got us thinking,” he said.
No search engine is a mind reader, of course, and many searches like “I want to end my life” do not elicit the suicide warning.
And there is the wrinkle that Google prides itself on giving users the exact information they are looking for. Functions like Google Suggest, which employ an algorithm to anticipate what a user is looking for based on the first words typed in the search box, can act as an unwitting guide. Under Google Suggest, for example, once you start typing in “ways to kill ...,” the function completes the sentence as “your self without pain.”
“We looked at many of the possible queries that could reflect interest in the topic,” Dr. Zeiger said about Google’s efforts. “We are starting relatively conservatively.”
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