Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook?
Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook?
By JULIA MOSKIN - New York Times, 5/17/2011
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. (For example, a general search for “chili” can be refined — by, say, a Texas-chili purist in Austin — to exclude any recipe that calls for beans.) 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, photo-heavy site, Cookzillas, the brainchild of a passionate cook in Bucharest, Romania, who happens to be a multimedia programmer, has more global recommendations than the United States-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 in an interview 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.”
With my friend the chili purist in mind, I ran a search for bean-free chili through all four engines. Over all, they were only intermittently successful at providing recipes that matched what I was looking for.
At Foodily, the No. 1 recipe from “chili no beans” was a winner — Tex-Mex Chili from Fine Cooking, an excellent recipe that I’ve made many times. But the next two results, one from nomeatathlete.com and the other from allrecipes.com — were packed with beans. On Cookzillas, once I subtracted beans from the search, the engine abandoned beef as well, leaving me with a venison chili, a green chili with pork and a turkey chili as the top three.
At Google Recipe Search, I searched for chili and then unchecked the box for beans, and the No. 1 recipe was for chili powder, not what I’d wanted. The second was a poorly rated recipe from Guy Fieri at foodnetwork.com, and the third was a highly rated one from Bobby Flay at the same site; there was no clue as to why the lower-rated recipe did better in the results.
AT Bing, the No. 1 recipe, “My Chili” by Michelle at allrecipes.com, has 413 enthusiastic reviews, most of them dotted with exclamation points. But it also has ground beef and canned tomato sauce, which would give that chili purist fits. The second and third recipes that popped up were from delish.com, a recipe site owned by Microsoft, Bing’s parent company. They seemed solid enough, but results from delish.com did not turn up in the other search engines, which made me wonder if Bing was weighted in that direction.
Not surprisingly, Web-fluent cooks have come up with their own search strategies.
Soraya Darabi, who is a founder of foodspotting.com and a digital strategist for ABC, said, surprisingly, that she still leans toward recipes from solid, old-media sources like Bon Appétit magazine except when it comes to desserts.
“Niche blogs are the best, because the people who write them really know their stuff,” she said, citing Sugar Plum as a specialist in all-American desserts like shoofly pie.
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.”
A lovely photograph can signal a solid, tested recipe or something else entirely. “If the photo doesn’t match the recipe, or looks like it was done by a food stylist when the recipe clearly is by a home cook, that should be a red flag,” said Michael Chu, a software engineer who also writes about food at Cooking for Engineers.
So what are recipe search results based on? According to Mr. 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 favor 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 optimization, the sometimes shadowy business of trying to loft one’s site to the top of a heap of results.
Duane Forrester, a product manager for Bing, said that it looks at more than recipe formatting. “There are roughly a thousand factors that we look at in any given search,” he said, including how long the average user stays on a recipe page and the number of links it has, where they come from, where they lead to.
The dominance of behemoth cooking sites in search results enrages many food bloggers.
“I think we all believe that there should be something fair and democratic about search,” said Deb Perelman, a blogger whose recipes at Smitten Kitchen — smittenkitchen.com — still turn up fairly often using the new engines. “If a team of developers can push any recipe up top, how good can that recipe search be?”
In a methodical post on her Web site food52.com, the former New York Times writer Amanda Hesser carved up Google’s Recipe Search, saying that many recipes it favored contained information that was coded in ways that boosted them in the rankings, even if that information was obviously inaccurate. (With help from Google, she found a cassoulet recipe that was supposed to weigh in at just 77 calories a serving, although a serving included a lamb shank and one whole sausage. Another cassoulet’s cooking time was given as one minute.)
According to Andrea Cutright of Foodily, the demand for nutrition information as a priority comes from users. Many people use recipe search tools to avoid certain foods — like milk, flour or sugar — for health reasons, she said, not as a path to transcendent cuisine.
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 penalized 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.
Unless she already knows and likes the source of the recipe and the reviews, she keeps scrolling.
“I don’t necessarily 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.
Finally, desperately seeking a great asparagus recipe for my imaginary dinner party, I tried out one last new search engine, this one independent and, in its way, radical. Eat Your Books does not publish any recipes at all. Instead, the founder, Jane Kelly, is indexing the recipes in thousands of cookbooks.
Eat Your Books does charge for this service; $2.50 a month or $25 a year. So far, it has built up around 80,000 searchable titles, with authors from Édouard de Pomiane to Rachael Ray to Heston Blumenthal. I found thousands of recipes for asparagus contained in books I already own, including one for asparagus vinaigrette with tarragon from “The Anatomy of a Dish,” by the chef Diane Forley. I’d made it years ago, loved it, dog-eared it and promptly lost track of it: the book is in my basement.
Google couldn’t find it — but that’s what I would serve on Saturday night.