"search" news and stories

It appears that this time it wasn't a K-9 unit, but rather a police officer, that did the nose work. After a pizza delivery woman reported being robbed at knife-point, Bartholomew County Sheriff's Deputy Jimmy Green canvassed the Columbus, Indiana, neighborhood to investigate. Green apparently noticed the distinct aroma of sausage and pepperoni at one residence. A search of the house turned up the missing pizzas and cash, a knife, and a phonebook still open to the pizza section, according to The Associated Press. Two young men believed to be the robbers were arrested at the house.

[Via Slice]

Originally limited to New York, MenuPages has been expanding quickly lately. The site, which features not only the hours, address, etc. of many restaurants, but also their menus and prices, so you know exactly what you're getting into before you go. MenuPages recently came to LA and even more recently launched in Philadelphia. Other cities the site covers include Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Washington.

If you've never used MenuPages before, it's worth a look, since you'll be able to determine whether a given restaurant actually has anything on their menu that you want to try, unlike straightforward restaurant reviews (and they have user comments/reviews, too), which only provide a price and the descriptions of a few dishes. The restaurant categories are more location-specific than most, too. For example, in Los Angeles, there is a distinct option for restaurants that serve Wings, while in Philly, there is a category for cheesesteak places. If the food you're craving isn't on the pre-set list, another great feature of the site is the "find a food search," which allows you to narrow down your restaurant selection to those that serve flourless chocolate cake or lobster rolls.

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Earlier this week, Nicole posted about recipe searches using Google itself, or Cooking with Google. Along those same "help me with what's in my fridge," life-gives-you-lemons kind of lines comes Snacksby.com. Admittedly still in its infancy, Snacksby describes itself as "like MacGyver, but for food." A search for "chicken, cucumbers, corn," which is what's in my fridge now, returned "Don't really expect anything, we've only got like 3 recipes and 12 ingredients here right now anyway. You should totally add a recipe or an ingredient." That may be a bit of an understatement, and some of Snacksby's features-tag clouds, food photo sharing-could be a lot of fun if/when more people start to contribute to the site. It's definitely worth a look. 

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.