When it comes to diagnosing an uncommon medical condition, the world's biggest search engine could be more reliable than your doctor's own knowledge, according to new research carried out in Australia.

Perhaps this is unsurprising when you consider that the average doctor has around two million pieces of medical information at their disposal, while Google can access a massive two billion medical journals in a matter of seconds.

However, the research team behind the study do point out that Google is only really a useful diagnostic tool for those with a sound medical knowledge and generally only for less common conditions.

The study was performed by scientists at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane and is featured in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal.

"Our study suggests that in difficult diagnostic cases, it is often useful to google for a diagnosis," study authors insist.

Google recently added a blog search capability to its main news search site following successful beta trials of the online tool.