Google Recipe Search

Today, Google announced the launch of a new recipe search feature. Yes, you could always search for recipes on Google before. The difference now is the flexibility and customizability that you'll have when you do it. You can access the recipe search from the vertical bar, and from there you can select various ingredients to include, cooking time to filter by, as well as calories. And if we know Google, they will probably be adding variations to that in the near future.

We here at HerbieLikesSpaghetti can't help but feel somewhat responsible for this. All the followers and Herbie fans we have within Google, thanks to Bryan's continuous pestering of his co-workers with his blog posts, must have lead them to believe this type of feature would be really useful. (Note: We were actually in no way responsible.)

One thing this means for us though is that we may try to start encoding our blog posts a little more clearly, and we encourage other food bloggers to do the same. The service works by reading HTML metadata wrapped around various pieces of text on the site. The Wired post linked above goes into more detail on this, so if you're interested in learning how to do this (as we are), check it out and see what you can do.

In any case - head over to Google and give this a try. And let us know if our winter caprese shows up in the next time you search for a recipe with the keyword: "delicious".

UPDATE: Our winter caprese will not show up, so long as we continue to host this blog on TypePad. Turns out TypePad does not support the parameters needed to implement this. So, other TypePad bloggers, be aware that if you try to code your recipes in such a way, it will not work. We'll look into other blogging platforms to see if we can come up with a solution and will report back when we find one.

UPDATE 2: We moved our blog to Blogger. Blogger supports the microformat data that Google Recipe search needs to read. It also has more designs, and is free.