Google has rolled out a new feature to help online consumers better search for recipes. Called, appropriately, Recipe View, it lets the user narrow a search result to show only recipes. It also helps the searcher choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures. More importantly, Recipe View provides a glimpse of how a search page built entirely around webpages using microformats and other structured data can work.
Slice and Dice the Choices
Users can search by a variety of features, such for specific dishes or via open-ended topics like ingredients or a holiday event, such as Cinco de Mayo. Filters for search results include cooking time, the all important calorie count and ideal ingredients.
The feature is based on data from rich snippets markup, which the search engine introduced at Searchology in 2009 and is part of Google's ongoing efforts to use structured data in search, it said in the blog post introducing the feature. Recipe View, in fact, is the first time Google has built a new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data.
A structured web had proven difficult to realize as it requires coordination on building specs and then that web page builders mark their pages up in complicated XML, Wired notes. So Google starting making its own suggestions to websites how they could start publishing meta-data with rich snippets. Recipe View is the first end result of that effort.
Online Food
Google chose an apt category to make this debut. Consumers are increasingly using the internet and mobile devices to obtain information not only about recipes, but information about food in general, according to a recent survey by Deloitte reported in MarketingCharts. It found, for example, that last year 36% of consumers visited a food company’s website to get recipes, compared to 35% in 2008 and 23% of consumers visited a food company’s website to get product information, compared to 22% in 2008. Furthermore, 23% of consumers made a food purchase as a result of something they read online, flat from 2008.
