Can recipe search engines make you a better cook?

Julia Moskin

LET?S say you have invited four people for dinner on Saturday. It?s now Wednesday morning, and reality is setting in. On the guest list: two pescatarians, a ?Top Chef? fanboy and a gluten avoider. Also, spring is in the air; local asparagus, arriving now. The challenge, as always: how to find dishes that are reliable, delicious and gastronomically correct?

The year has brought a rush of new recipe search engines designed to solve such quandaries. In February, Google introduced a tool called Recipe Search that lets you specify ingredients you do or do not want to use. Microsoft?s Bing browser has had its own recipe function for more than a year, and allows you to search within a single source, like a blog.

A few weeks before Google?s new tool was introduced, Foodily went live, with all results integrated with Facebook so that you can see which recipes your friends say they like. A new site, Cookzillas, the brainchild of a passionate cook in Bucharest who happens to be a multimedia programmer, has more global recommendations than the US-based engines, with English, Australian and Canadian sites in its scope.

With 10 million recipe searches a day on Google alone, the results surely influence what Americans eat. But when you idly type in ?cookies??the most common recipe search, according to Google?do these systems evaluate recipes the way a good cook would, by the clarity of their directions, the helpfulness of their warnings, the tastiness of the results? Probably not, based on extensive test-runs of the new tools.

?Their challenge is to translate ?yummy? into digital fingerprints,? said Paul Kennard, an expert in building web traffic.

Search engines used to rank recipes largely by popularity, according to the number of times they had been clicked and linked to from other sites. The newer models try to evaluate recipes and rank them by quality according to ever-changing, supposedly highly nuanced criteria, including the number of reviews, links and photographs each recipe has, as well as its popularity.

Jack Benzell, a designer of Google?s algorithm, said that although the company?s search will never be able to decide whether Thomas Keller?s brownies or Ina Garten?s are inherently better, the results are as nuanced and valuable as any others performed by Google, say, for new tires or Florida weather.

But in query after query that I made in Google and in Bing, recipes from large sites like allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com often occupied all top 10 results slots. Longer recipes with more detailed content, like the ones at popular food blogs like 101 Cookbooks or Chez Pim, rarely appeared on the first page of results. And results that are not found in the first two pages rarely are seen at all, according to experts.

Andrea Cutright of Foodily says that Google and Bing searches give preference to big sites because the algorithms are designed by programmers who are not cooks.

?You need people who understand ingredients, not just keywords and coding,? she said. ?Knowing that an aubergine is the same as an eggplant, or that drumsticks equal chicken legs, simply gives better results.?

Not surprisingly, web-fluent cooks have come up with their own search strategies.

Soraya Darabi, who is a founder of foodspotting.com said, surprisingly, that she still leans toward recipes from solid, old-media sources like Bon App?tit magazine.

?Niche blogs are the best, because the people who write them really know their stuff,? she said.

Adriana Guillen, a therapist in Brooklyn who often rates recipes online, said that she looks for longer recipes. ?It doesn?t mean that the recipe takes longer to make,? she said, ?it means that the recipe is more helpful.?

So what are recipe search results based on? According to Benzell, search engines love the taste of data: chunks called ?rich snippets? that sound like an appetizer but hold information like cooking time, nutrition information, yield and author. So recipes with long headnotes, hilarious prose or detailed instructions may be ignored in favour of recipes with starred ratings, specific cooking times or nutritional information coded in a specific way. Providing such content is a prime element in search-engine optimisation, the sometimes shadowy business of trying to loft one?s site to the top of a heap of results.

The Paris-based food blogger David Lebovitz said that, since the introduction of Recipe Search, traffic to davidlebovitz.com has dropped noticeably. A regular Google search for ?dulce de leche brownies? used to bring up his recipe in the first few pages.

In the new Recipe Search, he said, as many as 3,000 other sites come up first, many of which have simply copied his recipe into their own archive: a common practice that, he said, is now rewarded by Google?s programming. ?Everyone is just trying to scramble to the top of the list,? he said. ?I write recipes for readers, not for search engines, and I am being penalised for it.?

Meg Hourihan, who was one of the first serious food bloggers, said that she no longer trusts the crowd-sourced recipe ratings that Google and Bing rely on. ?I don?t even trust my friends to recommend recipes,? she said. ?I mean, which friends are we talking about? The ones who order in six nights a week??

Ultimately, searching for the ?best? recipe online is still like Internet dating?you might well stumble upon a great match, but if you do, it won?t be because the search engine knows what you like.