Evaluation of the google search appliance for patient cohort discovery

Rapid location of patient cohorts with specific attributes is critical to accelerating translational research. Given the ever-increasing popularity of web search engines for information retrieval, we performed an evaluation the Google Search Appliance (GSA) as a potential tool for performing a fast and simple retrospective analysis of our patient record for researchers discovering study cohorts. Overall, the GSA did not provide a significant advantage over conventional database queries. Possible reasons for this are presented.