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!

What does this cricket world cup mean to you?

"Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English." - Ashis Nandy

Google Logo for Cricket World Cup 2011. Doesn't the player in the doodle look like Sachin?

Beginning today, millions of people in India and around the world will be glued to their idiot boxes cheering their favorite teams. With cricket being one of the religions in India, world cup acts like a platform where in Indians come out of their cocoons and share a unique bond, unlike IPL where they take a dig at each other. And, the world cup fever only builds up more with the opening ceremony being a grand success.

This cricket world cup means different things to different people.

• To youngsters using social networks, it means a lot of spam with cricket related apps on facebook, and endless feeds on match and score details on twitter.
• To TV showrooms in India, it means lots of visitors outside their shops.
• To a corporate manager, it means decrease in the productivity of his/her subordinates.
• To a corporate employee, it means a reason to leave early in the evening to catch up with a cricket match.
• To bloggers, it means lot more topics to blog about.
• To people in movie business, it means off season.
• To news channels, it means no need to worry about their breaking news ticker tapes.
• To Sachin's fans, it means a reason to win the world cup.
• To any Indian, it means a topic to initiate a conversation.
• To my mom, it means an interruption to her in watching her favorite TV serials.
• And to me, it's nostalgia. 

What does it mean to you?

Google Chrome for Blogging

We all know how the web browser from Google, Chrome, achieved huge popularity with in a very short span of its release. Chrome's popularity can be attributed to its light weight and speed apart from its friendly bookmarking feature and task manager capabilities. Now, Chrome has extended its capabilities further by introducing a Web store for apps (add-ons from third party).

Couple of days ago I have written a guest post at Latest Tech Tips maintained by Harshad, a technology blogger and Java developer. Please find my post below.

Google Chrome Apps For A Better Blogging Experience

It talks about how these apps can be used to make your blogging experience a better one. Go ahead and explore the app store.

The Great Wall of India

A couple of weeks ago, an American national representing the company who sponsored our project at work asked me where in India I was from. Later on, he was telling me how he knew about the hatred between North Indians and South Indians. My response was "What!?!" He was telling me that people in India from North and South hated each other as much as they hated people from Pakistan. That was the first time I heard something like that!

But a quick search on the Internet about this issue gave me a much detailed insight. And yes, there is some coldness and indifference between the people from these two regions. They don't go well with each other for due to a variety of reasons like the Aryan and Dravidian divide, or the comparatively fair skin vs. dark skin or the food habits or languages they speak. We were those proud kids when we first learned of secular and diverse India during our primary and secondary school. I wonder what happened to all that cultural diversity lessons we learned. I wonder why we resort to silly reasons and superficial standards to judge and look down upon each other.

India from Google Maps at various zoom levels

In my version of Google Maps, I could not find a wall between North and South of India at any of its zoom levels. Does your version have that wall, that divide? I guess not! It's all in your minds and hearts.