Tech - Have you tried Google recipes?

In my previous post, I had predicted that, search engines will try to help users with more applied / custom searches. Right on cue, Google released a food recipe search last week. This search is specific to recipes and one can filter the results based on cooking time, ingredients and calories.


For now, it looks like Google is indexing the sites which have recipes using the RDFa or Microformat attributes. We are inching closer to the "semantic web" where we have richer attributes specifying a data. The richer the data, more the application of it. With the growth of smartphones, there will be even greater use of such data.

This also means that, to start with all the food sites will now have to tag their recipes with either RDFa or Microformat so that they appear better in Google. Either someone will have to develop a tool to do this conversion or perhaps employ people to do a one time conversion. It makes me think that as things keep changing, the change itself keeps generating opportunities for companies and people. Which begs the question, if technology stopped changing would it prevent companies from growing?

If you are interested to know more about RDFa or Microformat, here are a couple of sites. A good primer on RDFa. Similarily, a site for Microformat. The rest I am sure you can Google!

If you want to test your how your webpages would look in Google, you can try this useful testing tool, again from Google.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

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