I have to be a little easy when I discuss Google and their overarching methods of improving search. Since I allow Adsense ads to appear on my site, I cannot bite the hand that feeds me, of course. Still, Google is such an innovative company they sometimes don’t take the time to consider the ramifications of their innovations.
Nicholas Carr recently had a blog post discussing the changes Google has made when you search for recipes. At first blush it looks awesome, but Nicholas see a possible issue.
They add the following to your search criteria when looking for recipes:
- Ingredients
- Cooktime
- Calories
Again, it looks like that is useful information, but consider that Google has to use something called microdata to make the magic happen. It is amazing that Google cannot pull this information themselves based on a crawler, but it’s all good. The net of this is that if you don’t supply the microdata, someone selects the refinements Google offers then your recipe never sees the light of day.
Survive any disaster in your own home. Prepare now. A must for the coming problems in the world!This brings me to my point. What more than likely happened is some smart person at Google was hungry, looked for recipes and decided there was a better way to do it. They cooked something up, released it and we’re living with it. Notice there isn’t an easy method for existing recipes without microdata to be integrated. It is a very smart feature for those who can go back and add the microdata to their sites.
Of course, the final thing is that Google is making it easier to look for recipes. You have to ask yourself, though, do you want it artificially limited?
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