Recipe Searches Online

[Anna Blume]

Has anyone else been frustrated with Google as a search engine for finding specific recipes?

Lately, I've noticed that retrieved links do not respect the search terms I use and instead, offer approximations. For example, in trying to find the recipe for rough puff pastry in The Zuni Café Cookbook, when I use "zuni" or "rodgers" as search terms, either or both are ignored in the interest of providing someone else's recipe. The search engine decides "Rogers" is close enough or gives me something from The Food Network instead of the recipe I trust most.

[sheldman]

I think it should do better if you add a "+" to key words like "+zuni"

[lperry]

I read something recently about this problem - they are deliberately linking to those recipe compendiums. Let me see if I can find the article.

Edited to add a blog entry about it. Click. It looks like I must have seen it in the Times.

[Anna Blume]

I read something recently about this problem - they are deliberately linking to those recipe compendiums. Let me see if I can find the article.

Edited to add a blog entry about it. Click. It looks like I must have seen it in the Times.

Thanks! This makes sense, though I don't understand why accuracy is discarded and the company would make a useful tool inefficient. Funny thing, though. Shortly after I started this topic, it appeared as the new, third link. The closest I got to what I wanted was a reference to the recipe appearing to the side of an article by Russ Parsons on October 16, 2002. However, given current ad-practices vs. those of a decade ago, the margins of the LATimes omitted the instructions I sought.

[Ilaine]

Thanks! This makes sense, though I don't understand why accuracy is discarded and the company would make a useful tool inefficient.

One reason might be to give searchers a way to avoid the rising use, nay, inundation, of recipes by rackets that cut-and-paste pther people's content onto seemingly-benign websites in order to do something-or-other that involves gazillions of links to unrelated content? eHow for example?

[Pat]

One reason might be to give searchers a way to avoid the rising use, nay, inundation, of recipes by rackets that cut-and-paste pther people's content onto seemingly-benign websites in order to do something-or-other that involves gazillions of links to unrelated content? eHow for example?

I'm not sure what the reason is, but this blocks (or knocks way down in the results) legitimate bloggers who need/want the hits to their site.

I don't use the specific google recipe search, just the general search, and I generally have fairly good results with that. I've found some interesting blogs that way.

This site uses Google's custom search program to direct people to food blogs that are of known high quality. I keep it bookmarked:

http://foodblogsearch.com/