Slicing and dicing with Google’s ‘Recipe View’

Google recently added ‘Recipe View’ to its search menu as a way for people to easily find instructions for whipping up dishes in the kitchen.

“My parents follow the art of cooking by intuition, where the right amount of each spice is measured out by gut feel, but that’s never worked very well for me,” Google product manager Kavi Goel said while introducing Recipe View, on Thursday.

“As a math geek and computer engineer, I prefer to work with concrete numbers and instructions, including when cooking.”

Recipe View allows you to narrow your search results to show only recipes. This new view also helps you choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures.

To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes like ‘mango curry’ , or something more broad like chocolate to find recipes that require chocolate.

The new search view also allows you to search for specific holidays or events, like Christmas. You can go as lateral as you want searching for obscure things like ‘graduations’ and ‘tofu, chocolate and asparagus’.

“We like to ‘eat our own dog food’ at Google, meaning we like to test our own products and features ourselves before releasing them for public consumption,” Goel said. “With Recipe View, we’ve taken this more literally than usual.”

“Recipe View is based on data from rich snippets markup, which we first introduced at Searchology in 2009. If you’re a recipe publisher, you can add markup to your webpages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View.”

Google feels Recipe View as part of its “ongoing efforts to enrich the search experience using structured data”. This release is has also been referred an “exciting technical milestone” for the Google team as it is the first time the search giant has built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippet data.

Recipe View is available in the US and Japan, and more countries will be added in the future.