Jackson Lo

It feels great to be blogging again on my MacBook! If you hadn’t heard, couple days ago Google rolled out a new search tool for recipes. You simply type into the search box the dish you want, click the Recipe option on the left hand side and BAMM!, you get a list of all recipes aggregated from different food sources across the web. One of my favorite desserts is Tiramisu, and so, let’s go ahead and look at some ways people have been making their tiramisu cakes.

Here’s a screenshot of my search result from Google’s Recipe filter:

Some interesting, but very useful, stuff that gets pulled into the results snippet include:

• Image of the dish (if there is one)
• Ratings and reviews for the recipe
• Preparation time
• Ingredients
• Source (from which domain and category within the domain the recipe is being pulled from)

So before you click through on the first, second, or nineth result, you’ll be able to see at a glance what type of tiramisu dish it is.

You also have the option, along the left hand side, to filter your results to include or exclude ingredients, the amount of time it takes to make it, and the amount of calories that are in the dish (wow, that’s some extreme filtering right there!)

A bit of bad news for Canadians…. 

When there’s good news, there is always bad.

Unfortunately, this feature is not available for Canadians searching in Google.ca, at the moment. But not to worry, there is a way around it. You’ll have to recipe hunting in Google US, and to do so click on the following link:

http://www.google.com/webhp?sa=N&hl=en&tab=lw

Hopefully the Canadian version will roll out soon so we don’t need to redirect ourselves to the US search engines for advice (not to say there is anything wrong with it, but we need to type in this long URL just to get there!).

Foodily’s Food Search Engine

Just to bring another ‘competitor’ in the the picture, last month I came across a new search engine, a Food Search Engine, called Foodily. Foodily is unique in that it’s a search engine on it’s own, all about food. They’ve incorporated the Facebook’s ‘Like’ function so you can see what your friends have ‘Liked’ and maybe encourage you to pick that recipe too. You can add a recipe to your menu. The menu is your personal menu, just like a personalized cookbook but of recipes listed in Foodily. After you’ve done all that, you can create Facebook Events right from Foodily and begin marketing it to your friends on Facebook (sweet!).

Here’s a screenshot of a typical result you would get from Foodily for ‘tiramisu’:

Want to watch a video Foodily put together for their product?

Lots of Recipe Options on the Web

There are a lot of options out there to find the best recipe for the dish you want to make. It’s a matter of finding the best source and I think these two might be great additions to your list of food sources to finding deliciously tasting dishes (tongue twister). If you know of any other sources on the web, leave a comment below! I’d like to check it out and maybe add it to this series of food resources