Google brings Recipe View to search results

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet

Today Google unveiled an appetizing new search option for cooks and wannabe chefs: Recipe View.

The new search option will be a choice in the left rail that appears after entering a Google search. You can search for recipes by entering the name of a dish or food type, an ingredient, or just an occasion, such as Cinco de Mayo. The results can be further filtered by preparation time, ingredients, or calories. Result recipes also sport star ratings and user reviews, so you can see which ones have been hits.

The feature is more than a taste-bud pleaser, though. In order to implement it, Google engineers made use of rich snippet data. Google product mangaer Kavi Goel said in a blog post that the technology was introduced at the Searchology conference in 2009.

"If you're a recipe publisher, you can add markup to your webpages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View," Goel writes. "Recipe View is part of our ongoing efforts to enrich the search experience using structured data, and this release is an exciting technical milestone for our team since its first time we've built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data."

Microsoft's competing Bing introduced a nearly identical feature last month. The Google and Bing offerings are similar even down to the user ratings and calorie display. Bing adds the ability to filter by the recipe's source site, cooking method, occasion, convenience, and cuisine nationality. Though it offers fewer filters, the Google Recipe feature seems more precise in listing exact calorie amounts rather than Bing's bar graph, precise cooking times rather than just convenient vs. "make ahead," and all ingredients vs. just the main ingredients.

Google's new recipe chooser will roll out in the U.S. and Japan starting today, with more countries to follow.

This article, written by Michael Muchmore, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc..