Now You're Cooking....With Google?

I love food.  I'm Italian, so of course I do.  Food is right up there for me...like...like...technology. 

So what's better than the blending of the two, right?  Google Base  was something Google had launched some time ago.  To recap what it is....

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.

In truth this hasn't been a service I've used too often.  Not sure why, just haven't.  But my wife was looking up a particular recipe for a Pecan Butter Tart and when I commented over dinner how good it was she said, "I found the recipe on Google Base."

"Google," I said in a corrective tone.
"Uh...no Google Base, guess that's Google right."

I was intrigued.  So I had her show me where she got it.  Sure enough, they have a recipe index built in Google Base.  I was curious and muttered to myself, "How is this different than looking for pecan butter tart using Google search?"

My wife pointed to the pre-built ways of refining your search, things like drop down menus that let you pick the main ingredient or type of cuisine. You can also add refining criteria like Cooking Time that then gives you an additional drop down menu to specify cooking time.  I liked what I saw because it further empowers us to effectively search.  Sure I could type "pecan butter tart" into Google, but when I do I get a lot of unrelated stuff and no easy way to refine the search from a food/recipe-centric point of view.  That's when the strength of Google Base hit me.  It'll be interesting to see the other types of topic-centric-search frameworks that get developed in this interesting tool.

Bon Appetitto!

Comments

[Stephen]

I think remax is coming out in Canada with a new real estate service leveraging google base.