Recipe search, Google hungry for people
Google have just released a new feature; search for recipes. Whilst previously users were able to obtain a multitude of results for these queries – which were handled through ordinary results, this additional functionality brings to your table a number of other useful features.
Firstly, users can search and filter by ingredients, and also narrow down the results based on cooking time, and calories. This allows you to easily get rid of ingredients which a user either doesn’t like, or may be allergic to, only returning recipes which are healthy or quick to cook.
The facility is likely to be every students dream, with the ability to type in whatever can be found in the fridge, and lets Google concoct a delicious quick and easy meal to make Jamie Oliver jealous.
According to the search giant, about one percent of all searches performed on the search giant each day are for recipes. If you consider that they handle about a billion queries per day, that’s 10 million recipe searches. That’s a massive amount of hungry mouths looking for food online.
The search also lets you look at other additional data surrounding the recipe. You can find recipes from particular chefs, or indeed things as abstract as recipes for religious festivals.
From a technical perspective, Google have once again shown their expertise in the parsing of complex data, and the data mining and collation to launch this product is immensely complex. It also hints at the increasing move towards using structured data such as RDFa, and microformats that Google in the past while have begun to ask for from publishers. As and when they want to find out the information to create a new search feature, typically this is the format they ask for, which is more easily parsed by their bots.
Without this additional markup on the page, Google finds it immensely difficult to make a forray into a particular search vertical, and generate revenue from it. Other information they are clearly looking to receive include people (which Facebook and LinkedIn are both using to provide data) and events, hinting that a Google people search and Google What’s on may be services they are planning on somewhere down the line. Stay tuned for that one, undoubtedly one of the eagerly awaited services, with the most far reaching implications is just around the corner.
That said, Recipe search is a particularly nice improvement to Google search, and can be really useful to amateur chefs and pro’s alike. Take a look a the video below to find out more:
Today’s guest blog comes from Paul Anthony, who works as Internet Marketing Manager for Northern Ireland’s largest property website, PropertyPal.com. His role within the company includes managing all search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and social media activity.
PropertyPal.com is Northern Ireland’s number 1 property website, displaying details of more homes for sale and rent than any other website. It has around 95% of all properties for sale and rent, and at any time stocks over 40,000 properties to buy or rent. Including at time of writing approximately 1200 houses for sale in Bangor.
