FoodieView Recipe Search Engine – Spotlight #3
The third search engine in the Spotlight of 500 Search Engines is a nifty recipe search engine called FoodieView. FoodieView indexes recipes from all over the web into one easy to find search engines which lets its users drill down in search results by ingredients, national cuisine, special diets (eg. low-carb friendly or diabetic or vegan) and famous chefs. FoodieView also supplies information on recipe ratings and even offers a recipe box for saving the recipe links for later.
FoodieView recently launched with over 110,000 recipes indexed, quality recipes that is. Consider its ranking of quality recipes similar to Google PageRank or duplicate content filters. In order for FoodieView to offer a distinctive selection of original quality recipes they are not parsing the dozens of “me-too recipe” sites that have all the same recipes culled from Usenet and article distribution. Howie Wang, creator of FoodieView told the Search Engine Journal that FoodieView is “currently crawling the major cooking sites like AllRecipes, Epicurious, Recipezaar, and FoodTV. We also include some lesser-known, but very valuable sites, like some of the big food bloggers, and small, more authentic, ethnic recipe sites.”
Howie added that FoodieView’s goal is to make searching for recipes online easy, and not a back and forth task for users “If you’ve ever tried doing research on recipes on the net before, you’ll know why I created this site. Usually you end up going to 3 or 4 different sites and using the search forms of varying quality and speed, and going back and forth.”
Being a connoisseur of fine International cuisine and having just satisfied my taste buds with a homemade dish of Diced Lamb & Tofu Curry, garnished with Shavings of Garlic and Bean Sprouts with a side serving of Japanese Rice, I decided to give FoodieView a whirl. My first search was for “tuna sushi” which served results ranging from Watermelon Sushi to Tomato Sushi. While most results served a description of the recipe (and all descriptions included Tuna) I was quite pleased, except for the Watermelon and Tomato results.
However, Watermelon Sushi does sound interesting. Come to find out Watermelon Sushi is kind of a tuna salad sushi with black sesame seeds, placed on cucumber slices – which looks like a watermelon. However, let’s pretend I’m a vegan (and forget that I had tender slices of lamb for dinner tonight) and look for some vegan friendly sushi. I’ll go back and change the search query to “sushi” and then filter by vegan results. The vegan results were fantastic, with meatless Sushi Party Balls, Inari (fried tofu) Zushi, and Tomato Bombs. FoodieView filtering worked perfectly with no repeats of recipes and seamless results.
If you’re a food fanatic or want to check out a useful vertical search engine, give FoodieView a try.
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Spotlight of 500 Search Engines – Search Engine Journal is reviewing 500 search engines this year to help share the spotlight that the larger engines enjoy. If you represent a search engine or know of one that should be reviewed, email us with search engines you would like to see in the Spotlight of 500 Search Engines. Please mail us the search engine URL, description, your contact information, and any traits or offerings which make the search engine special. With a goal of 500 search engines to review in one year, we’ll need all the help we can get.
