Google has announced the launch of health cards in India today. Coming a year after the US launch, the search giant has launched the 'Lite' cards in India, owing to the slow bandwidth and 50 per cent of the users still on slow speed 2G networks. It is available on the Google app in Android, iOS and desktop.



Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant that has been integrated with Google Search. It also offers cards that pull information from Gmail, information for nearby events, weather, traffic information and more. Google has now added health info to its Knowledge Graph. So when someone searches for a common heath condition or query, Google will show snippets and information from the validated sources. Google also shows instant answers. These cards will be available both in English and Hindi language at the moment. In the long run, Google plans to launch it in Indic languages too.



Google has collaborated with Apollo Hospitals, Columbia Asia Hospital and many other hospitals to review and validate the results. It plans to add more conditions to the cards. Currently, 431 conditions have been listed under the health cards. According to Google, one in 20 searches are health related.

"We are very interested in going past 400 conditions. The existing 400 show the conditions Indians have been searching for. But we don't have a fixed timeline. We consult with medical doctors and search log," says Prem Ramaswami, Senior Product Manager at Google.

Google has been actively promoting its search features. It had aired a series of advertisements on TV during the Cricket World Cup T20 that concluded on Sunday and still continues to air those ads. The company did not reveal any plans around advertising the health cards.

After US and Brazil, India is the third country to get the health cards.

