Google launches microformat-powered recipe search

Today, Google launched a new search feature: Recipe View!

The new search category enables users to discover recipes that have been marked-up following the hRecipe specification from a variety of sources with a new level of accuracy. Google have made it easy for users to find recipes, because authors are now making it easy for them to locate their data from within their web pages.

Wired reports:

“Our intent is to make better user expereince to see if we can jumpstart this ecosystem,” Menzel said. “That way when someone thinks ‘Hey, I just invented a great recipe, let me put it on my blog,’ and that person’s recipe should be a candidate.”

But Menzel insists it’s got to be easy and that Google doesn’t want to push busy webmasters to do any work that won’t result in more traffic.

“This is really a pragmatic response to the dream of the semantic web,” Menzel said. “We would love if the XML world existed — it would make search awesome, but no one is going to to do it. But we need to start somewhere, and a lot of the internet is built manually by people and their time is valuable.”

ReadWriteWeb also notes:

Google didn’t indicate if it has plans to expand this sort of markup into other search efforts, but it’s a good reason – at the very least for recipe publishers – to mark up your websites.

We’re very excited about this new feature from Google, and are pleased to see the organisation continue to support and implement open standards that are simple for authors everywhere to use.

For more information on the specification, check out the hRecipe wiki pages.

5 Responses to “Google launches microformat-powered recipe search”

  1. Cooking Three Times :

    Sweet! I’m just starting my own cooking blog. This could be a great way to disseminate recipes. Thanks for the link to the code spec. Super useful.

    February 27th, 2011 at 5:49 am

  2. MicroAngelo :

    Wow… I could have easily missed this. Currently it’s only available on Google.com, apparently not on Google.co.uk (or I’d assume the other country-specific searches). Not really sure why, as the results appear to include UK sites: you’d have thought this would work equally well for all English language sites without modification.

    March 7th, 2011 at 10:52 am

  3. Robin :

    This is great, however as MicroAngelo stated, only works on google.com, I can’t wait for it to be added to the Swedish version, as my food-blog/portal will be the first in Sweden to support hrecipe (and other microformats aswell).

    April 18th, 2011 at 1:31 am

  4. Dave Doolin :

    This is pretty cool. I’ve been waiting for Google to do this for a couple of years.

    Now that Google has, there is a mini gold rush on in the blogging space to strip mine all those food blogs of recipe data. And about half the food bloggers seem convinced this will give them magic SEO powers, which it won’t.

    Another really interesting thing is that Google sort of nods to hrecipe, but really does more it’s own thing. Some of the optional elements in hrecipe, Google seems to require.

    Disclaimer: I’ve had my own WordPress plugin for hrecipe for a couple of years. It’s not hard to find (and neither am I), so I don’t feel compelled to spam the comments here with the link.

    April 20th, 2011 at 2:25 pm

  5. Infoweblink :

    Is This The Same With this mozila plugin?
    Operator 0.9.5.6
    by mkaply

    Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

    I Intend to try it,Operator
    Thanks

    May 25th, 2011 at 7:28 pm