Google cooks recipes into search menu

A "Recipe View" feature that Google is rolling out in the United States and Japan turns the search engine into an online cook book of sorts.

"My parents follow the art of cooking by intuition, where the right amount of each spice is measured out by gut feel, but that's never worked very well for me," Google product manager Kavi Goel said while introducing Recipe View, on Thursday.

"As a math geek and computer engineer, I prefer to work with concrete numbers and instructions, including when cooking."

The feature narrows search results to only recipes along with ratings for each option.

Recipe search terms can range from names of dishes to favored foods, such as strawberries, or holidays. Searches can be filtered by calorie count, cooking time, or ingredients.

"We like to 'eat our own dog food' at Google, meaning we like to test our own products and features ourselves before releasing them for public consumption," Goel said.

"With Recipe View, we've taken this more literally than usual."

The feature is to be rolled out to other countries after it becomes more seasoned.

(c) 2011 AFP