What’s For Dinner? Bing Mixes Recipes Into Search Results

Jan 21, 2010 at 11:38am ET by Greg Sterling

Bing is now giving special placement to recipes in response to some food-related searches:

Bing pulls from a number of popular recipe websites (delish.com, MyRecipes.com, epicurious.com.com, etc.) to bring you correlating recipes that you can sift through by holiday, meals, ratings, and my personal favorite, convenience (with a 10 month old at home, quick is key) and much more.

Plug in a potential ingredient, such as sausage, or a food item such as chocolate chip cookies, and you’ll see links to recipes embedded within the regular search results, within a special section:

Clicking on any particular recipe or the “recipes” link above the section takes you to a new “recipes task page,” where Bing provides nutritional information and calculates the relative calories and fat content of recipes. You can see an example of this deep dive here:

The page also allows you to narrow recipes by star rating, by main ingredient and other options including for some, if they are “kid friendly.”

Want to access the recipe search feature directly? That’s not possible, at the moment. You have to hope it appears in response to an ordinary search. However, to increase the odds, add the word “recipe” to your search. For example, searching for macaroni and cheese doesn’t trigger the box — but macaroni and cheese recipes does.

Even though this seems like a minor thing, it’s an appealing and useful feature that may attract loyalty, frequency or some new usage.

Here’s a video from Bing that explains the feature more:

Looking for the same thing at Google? Keep looking. Google experimented in 2006 with integrating recipes out of its Google Base service. That died (despite the link still living in Google’s own search results) when Google retired the Google Base search feature.

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Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about media and the connection between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling.

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