Friday, February 25, 2011

Bring out the chef in you with Google!

For all you people like me who stay away from home and crave for delicious home cooked food every time you eat the food you cooked, here is some help. What was mastered by our mommies and grand mas through intuition in dishing out wonders, was turned by us - the new generation - into calculated numbers and instructed portions of ingredients. And Google, which is under an oath to follow the quote "Make hay while the sun shines" and which makes the best of the information available to them, is here to help us out in making lip smacking food ourselves with their Google Recipe View.

Searching recipes for Mirchi Pakora using Google Recipe View. You can filter out the results based on cooking time and ingredients.
Recipe View, as they say in their official blog, is based on Rich Snippets feature Google introduced a couple of years earlier for webmasters. And it allows users like me to search recipes based on ingredients and cooking time. Isn't that cool?

But after a brief beta testing using Indian recipe search terms made me think that Google needs to work a little more in organizing the data they have. While writing a recipe for mirchi pakoras, people might use "green chillies" or "green peppers" or "hari mirch" in the list of ingredients required. And Google's engine must be very smart in identifying that all these mean the same. And it should be able to list out all the recipes when an appropriate search string for recipe is given by users. This is the reason why they have given out certain instructions to the writers of recipes, which in the long run would help them in improving this feature.

And a note to all you super cooks out there who help us all the time by posting your recipes online. If you want to make the best out of this and want their Recipe View to feature the recipes you posted on your site, please optimize your posts on recipes by following the instructions here and here. By following their instructions, you are helping us as well in making your recipes available to us in a better way.

So, what's stopping you? Start using Google Recipe View and bring out the chef in you!

3 comments:

  1. Vee, thanks for sharing this... i didn't see this feature. Btw, i learnt cooking, well mostly, by searching for recipes online!

    take care

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Vee, nice sharing this one...:) My son would love it...my son wishes to be a chef someday in a 5 star hotel...but that would still be far from happening! He will take a second course in culinary arts after he's done with a Bachelor of Arts in History in UP Baguio City! Quite a long way to go before he becomes a real chef na... :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Restless -
    Oh, that's a surprise to me. But may be I should not be, because whatever cooking I do is all based on recipes again.

    Amity -
    Oh, my best wishes to your soon. This thing from Google must interest him then! i have a friend who took courses in culinary arts. it requires lot of courses and time before becoming a name in that field. Good luck to him..

    ReplyDelete

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