Recipe aggregators

Google and Foodily break it down

By Culinate staff

March 7, 2011

Once upon a not-very-long-ago time, if you wanted to find and compare recipes online, you had two options: the DIY attempt (trolling through Google’s general results or toggling between multiple browser tabs) and the niche aggregator (scanning the food-blog recipes collected by FoodBuzz, for example).

Google, however, recently introduced an internal recipe search, producing recipe lists based on such search terms as ingredients and cook time. Enter your recipe search terms in the main Google field, then click Recipes in the top left-hand corner of the Google page to refine your search.

If you can’t find an old favorite recipe using the new search, however, it may be because Google requires food and recipe websites to add additional code to existing recipes in order for them to show up in the search results. Helpfully, blogger Elise Bauer, writing on Food Blog Alliance, spells out what’s required of bloggers for their recipes to appear in the new recipe search — but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of extra work will be required.

Also new is Foodily, a simple website focused on ingredients. Search for, say, “buckwheat blini” minus the ingredient “yeast,” and Foodily returns a scrollable, horizontal list of relevant recipes. Ingredients and instructions can be compared left to right, unlike Google’s top-to-bottom format. And for Facebookers, the site lets you see what your pals like to eat, too.