Google recipe search makes dinner easier

My bookshelves hold tons of cookbooks, but I've always used Google to search for recipes. It's been helpful to compare multiple recipes and see how they line up with the ingredients I already have in my pantry. I could take a bit of one recipe and add it to another and create a meal.

But now Google has introduced Recipe View, which allows you to filter out the non-recipe content from your results. In the past I've always just typed in "recipe" in the search box, and it filtered out most of the unwanted content. But Recipe View takes it one step further. On the left-hand side of the page, there will be options to filter your results by ingredients, cooking time, and caloric amount. You can also search by a particular chef's name or a holiday to get ideas.

In a video on the Google blog, Google Chef Scott Giambastiani shares ways he uses this new tool in the kitchen, for example filtering by ingredient.

I could see myself doing this. Each week my family receives a box of produce from a CSA farm, and often there are new vegetables that I've never cooked with before. Last week we had celeriac, which is a root vegetable that tastes like celery. Say I wanted to make soup with the leeks and celeriac I already had in my refrigerator. I could type soup into the search box, filter by leeks and celeriac, and get some good recipes. Since I'm a working mom, I would probably filter by cooking time (homemade soup in less than 15 minutes!).

Google is basing Recipe View on Rich Snippets markup, which allows people to get summary information about their search results, like ratings and reviews.

The service will initially be available in the United States and Japan, but the search giant plans to release it in other countries. I'm not currently able to see it on my browser, but I'll be looking for it.