The role of the health professional supporting consumers who use ‘Dr Google’

Google has become so synonymous with information search, retrieval and sharing that it entered our lexicon as the most-used verb to express searching information online. Consequently, few are surprised to learn that ‘googling’ applies as equally to health information seeking as it does to TV series spoilers or homemade slime recipes. Almost half the population uses what is now referred to as ‘Dr Google’ (Astrup, 2018), the use of the Google search engine to obtain information relating to health matters.