New Google recipe feature

by Nicole Weston, Posted Jun 20th 2006 @ 7:07PM

I was Googling a few recipes when an unexpected thing came up on my screen: new search boxes. As you can see from the screenshot above, Google has created a neat way to search for recipes by ingredient and cuisine.

It turns out that this is just an updated version of Google Base, which Andrew mentioned some months ago when the program was still in its infancy. I didn't find this feature to be nearly as helpful as Cooking with Google. My search for "beef" and "american" gave me a bunch of links to Epicurious, so it really would have been more useful to go right there, while "beef" and "usa" turned up results from www.fooddownunder.com for some reason.

The problem is that, even though there is an option to search by "course," you can't really narrow your options down at all. The "ingredient" category is limited to one option and it is one of a preset drop-down menu. All things considered, the system needs a lot of refinement to make it user friendly. And to set it apart from existing resources, they might want to consider indexing less-accessed sites that have a lot to offer, such as food blogs.

Tags: cooking with google, epicurious, gadget, google, google base, recipe, search, website