NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, April 2011
Free Online Recipe Search
By Ira Wilsker, Radio Show Host,
Columnist, College Professor and deputy sheriff
iwilsker@sbcglobal.net
(click to email author)

WEBSITES:
http://www.google.com/landing/recipes/
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.google.com
http://www.alltheweb.com
http://www.bing.com

A perennial question around my house is "what's for dinner?" We did not go grocery shopping today, but we do have a freezer full of food. I selected some lean round steaks from the freezer, and dutifully thawed them. Steak can be cooked in many ways, broiled, brazed, grilled, and in many other ways. Feeling like something different with the now thawed steak, I needed to come up with an idea using only the ingredients that I already had around the kitchen. I can be pretty creative, and my creations usually (but not always) come out good, but tonight I needed some inspiration. I had previously heard about Google's free recipe search utility, but had never before used it. So, tonight I tried it. What I found was a very useful compilation of online recipes and hints that could be customized to meet my personal needs. Google is not alone in offering such a service, as Yahoo!, AllTheWeb, and Bing all offer detailed recipe links and resources.

Details of the Google recipe service can be found at google.com/landing/recipes, and is very easy to use. I went to Google.com and typed in "round steak" and was presented with an impossible to review 1.43 million choices containing the words "round steak". On the left of the Google results was a menu with one of the choices being "Recipes". Clicking on Recipes reduced the selection to 26,400 links. Google then gave the choice to select ingredients including pepper, onion, Italian dressing, marjoram, bourbon (really!), shortening, beef (naturally), and dry mustard. By checking those ingredients either individually or in combination presented a revised search result containing recipes containing those ingredients. Google can narrow the results based on cooking time, with the displayed choices of "Less than 15 min; Less than 30 min; and Less than 60 min." Additionally, the user can narrow the choices based on calorie content (per serving) by clicking on "Less than 100 cal; Less than 300 cal; and Less than 500 cal." I tried the automated Google ingredient selection tool, and clicked on "onion" because I like something onion with my steaks; Google instantly reloaded and presented me with a choice of 6,680 round steak recipes containing onion.

With the round steak - onion results displayed, the ingredient list on the left side of the display changed to reflect a different list of ingredients that are included in recipes that contain both round steak and onions. The revised ingredient list, with "onion" in bold now included sour cream, cream of mushroom soup, beef, molasses, and green beans. Also still residing on the left side of the screen were the cooking time and calorie selections. Since I like sour cream, and have some sour cream in the refrigerator, I checked the sour cream box (onion was pre-checked), and Google immediately reloaded displaying a list of 492 recipes (actually websites with recipes containing those ingredients), with some new additional ingredient selections on the left side of the screen. By repeating this process, I was able to review several recipes that were both appealing, and utilizing only ingredients already available in my kitchen. Clicking on a cook time of 30 minutes or less, presented 39 websites with recipes that complied with all of my parameters. Many of the recipes (web links) listed had been tried by others previously who reviewed the results and posted their reviews and "star ratings" which can provide the user with some indication of the 'goodness" of the finished recipe. Google can provide links to customized recipes containing almost any conceivable ingredients, which some cooks, both family and professional, may find useful.

While Google is the default search engine for many users, and has also become a contemporary colloquial verb for internet search ("I will Google it"), it does not have a monopoly on searches and service. Other major search engines including Yahoo!, its sister search engine AllTheWeb, and Microsoft's Bing, all have some sort of intelligence when it comes to searching for recipes. In order to be consistent, I used "round steak" as a search term on those engines to compare the results.

Going to Yahoo! (yahoo.com), and having its "Search Assist" turned on by default, as I typed the term "round steak" a suggestion "round steak recipes" was at the top of the list. Selecting that choice, Yahoo! found 7.78 million "round steak recipes". On the top of the screen was a set of "Top User Rated Recipes" mostly from Better Homes and Gardens, and included Mushroom and Onion Sauced Round Steak,

Herbed Steak and Onions, Oriental Family Steak, Stuffed Steak Pinwheels, and Steak Pinwheels Stuffed with Spinach and Bacon. On the left side of the screen were selections that could be used to narrow the search which included links to "About: Southern Food; Allrecipes.com; Cooks.com; and CD Kitchen." Clicking on the "About: Southern Food" link opened a scrumptious list of 465 recipes using round steak. Clicking on the other selections on the left margin gave additional recipes, with Cooks.com having the most round steak recipes at 292,000! Yahoo! demonstrated that it too can be a great source for finding recipes. AllTheWeb (alltheweb.com), being a sister company of Yahoo! presented a somewhat similar list as Yahoo! but with the inclusion of Wikipedia as a resource on the left margin.

Microsoft has been heavily promoting its Bing search engine (bing.com) as an intelligent decision making tool, and it too provided a recipe service. The top of the search result page for the term "round steak" had a tab marked "Recipes", as well as the first link at the top of the page being "Recipes for round steak". Both the tab and the link opened the same search page, which as is typical displayed the top search results in the body of the page, as well as a comprehensive list of options on the left margin. The options listed on the left which are used to narrow the search, are far more comprehensive than those listed on the other search engines identified, including Google. The options listed, each with many sub-categories, are: Star rating (ratings by those posting reviews); Cuisine or genre' (such as American, southern, Asian, French, Thai, etc.); Convenience (quick and easy, kid-friendly, entertaining, and others); Occasion (season of the year, Father's Day, baby shower, Chinese New Year, Mardi Gras, and about 20 other occasions; ingredients (about two dozen listed); Course (main dish, appetizer, breakfast, lunch, sandwich, salads); cooking method (fry, grill, slow cook, sauté, bake, roast, and about a dozen more); and Recipe Provider (major websites, Food network, and others). I selected 4-Star and above rated recipes, quick and easy, and Southern; Bing presented me with a list of five recipes all of which met that criteria, and included country style steak, Swiss steak, country fried steak, country fried steaks with biscuits and gravy, and Bubba's country fried steak with gravy. By coincidence, all of these recipes were from the Food Network.

The answer to the question, "what's for dinner tonight?" may be as close as your favorite search engine. And yes, I had a good dinner tonight.

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