By: Jason Best, www.Slashfood.com
Google is already the go-to site for answers to just about every obscure questions you can think of. “What’s the capital of Kazakhstan?” or “What are the symptoms of Dengue fever?”
Now the internet juggernaut is looking to be the source for a decidedly more workaday query: “What’s for dinner?”
Google has just launched a new “Recipe View” feature, allowing home cooks to search the entire mindboggling expanse of the web but limit their results to only recipes. Type in the name of an ingredient or dish at Google.com, and when the results pop up (in, of course, something like .14 seconds!), click “Recipes” on the left-hand side of the screen.
That means that when you search for “jambalaya,” you won’t have to sift through things like the entire cultural history of the Creole classic or YouTube clips of Hank Williams singing “Jambalaya on the Bayou.”
But you still get 39,700 recipes.
That said, the results display pictures and starred reviews from other cooks when they’re available. The feature also allows you to filter your search by whether the recipe includes various ingredients, how long it takes to cook, and whether it’s less than 100, 300 or 500 calories.
So does that mean you’re that much closer to discovering the secret to, say, great jambalaya that takes less than 15 minutes to cook and is under 100 calories?
Alas, no. The only result in that category is for “Jillian’s Spicy Sour Cream,” which leads to another question Google searches often beg: “Huh?”