Google adds spice with new recipe search

If you run a Google search for Gingerbread, you’re probably going to get nothing but a lot of Android news. But what if you want to see all the kinds of gingerbread confectionery recipes on the Internet? Now you can.

Google is launching a new feature to its search engine called Recipe View. It culls through the Web’s numerous recipe-centric websites and directs users onlt to websites that have cooking directions laid out in relation to the searched term.

It functions the same way as the Images, News, or Videos search now. There’s a special “Recipes” tab that will enable to specialized search.

“We’re pretty excited about it. The first thing we wanted to nail is focusing your search. Fried chicken? Turns out this is a really ambiguous search — there’s fried chicken as a concept, a restaurant location, a recipe. Ina Garten? You’d find pages about her cooking show, her biography, her life as a chef, but if you just want her recipes? With recipe views, you get just the recipes,” said Google product manager Kavi Goel, who is a self-proclaimed foodie.

Google says there’s a veritable treasure trove of recipes online – it estimates the number of lasagna recipes alone to be nearly three million. Yet there’s no good way to search through those great recipes. Until now.

“The really cool thing here is there’s a big diversity in the types of results. You can have the ‘world’s best’ but it takes 3¼ hours, or a 4-star recipe that takes an hour. It’s kinda nice,” added Goel.