Searching for Recipes Just Got Easier

Emily Creech - March 1, 2011

Every time I am in need of a new recipe, I always turn to the same place, Google, regardless of how many cookbooks I own. Google has just made my quest for excellent recipes even easier. If you go to Google and search for a specific food or recipe, such as chicken parmesan, blueberry pie, or even pomegranates, you will see pretty typical search results within the body of the page. You may see things like a Wikipedia listing, food websites, Google images, and recipes all mixed into those results. However, if you are interested in seeing recipes only, you can now easily do just that by clicking the “Recipes” link located on the left hand side of the page. This will take you to Google’s Recipe View.

Below is a Recipe View for chicken parmesan.

What’s great about this new feature is that if you know you have limited time or specific ingredients, you can filter the results by cook time and ingredients. If you are counting calories, you can filter by the number of calories as well.   For those who are all too familiar with flipping through pages and pages of search results to find a recipe that suits your palate and lifestyle, this feature will make your life a bit easier.

For website containing recipes, this is certainly a good feature for you!   As you may expect, however, there is some work required. In order for your recipes to show within the Recipe View and have the opportunity to display rich snippets (introduced in the spring of 2010), you will need to do some coding work. There is quite a bit of information from Google about rich snippets and how to mark up recipe information for you to reference.   Following these instructions will enable your recipes to display in the search results with rich snippets or display in the Recipe View, but it will not guarantee that the markup on a page will be used.  

Try Recipe View to find something new for dinner tonight, or start working on modifying your website’s pages to help them stand out from the rest.