Google Food Recipe Search Introduced – What Meal Will You Cook Up?

Written by Rob Nichols on February 25, 2011 · Filed under Internet 

Search giant Google has today begun to roll out a further expansion of its already comprehensive search tools by introducing a food recipe search facility.

Google itself hasn’t actually spoken out about it officially yet like they did with their recent Instant Search feature, however some engineers within the company, in an exclusive interview with Wired, revealed the plans.

The tool itself allows users to obviously search for recipes, but also filter based on number of calories, ingredients and more, with all the usual kitchen related stuff going on, however it is not this which is so amazing, more what goes on behind the scenes.

Underneath, the tool uses XML tags marked in recipe sites around the web to structure an entire catalogue of recipes, which is apparently a dream that Google holds for all of it’s search tools, though expert engineers say it will be nigh on impossible to get the entire web structured in such a way that allows pure natural language search of the entire web.

So, whilst this is a great early implementation, it would be great to see this technology develop, and more webpages to store the metadata required to make it work on a universal scale. It allows much clearer searches on the user’s end, and a much more comprehensive, direct, and accurate set of results. What is there to not want?

Will you testing out Google Recipe Search when you’re next cooking a meal? Or are more traditional recipe sources still a better option for you?

Source: Wired