On February 24th, Google launched their new “Recipe” feature. This adds yet another facet on the left side of their ever-growing left navigation menu. Following Google’s goal to give users what they want, they have decided that now the kitchen is the new portion of the house that they will conquer!
View of Google's Recipe function
This new feature (seen to the left) is another great function that will eventually extend Google into more places in the home. They are already established in the Living Room with Google TV, the business with free business functions (like email, document storage, free phone numbers, and much more) and now the kitchen.
Their new function allows users to type in a single ingredient, like the example I used of “Venison” and then begin to filter through different combining ingredients, cook time, calories, etc.
Speaking with my wife about the functionality she said simply “That’s pretty cool”. While not overly excited, i began to think about whats next…
Leveraging the new craze in tablet devices, users will now be able to find their meal from the train, the car, or anywhere they want.
However, this isn’t just a new type of filter for content (something not that difficult to do), but it is interesting to know how they are doing it. Microdata. This is the concept that for each type of content they are creating specific formats that people must store, write, and manage their data with. These “Rich Snippets” create a specific method to call, store, and display the data that Google states. You can find more about this markup standard on Google’s help center here. So basically, they are creating a standardized, taxonomy of data they look at.
This practice is very interesting if you compare this with how they deliver content, integration into the enterprise, and generally how people manage data on their sites. This means, as usual, that you need to know how Google works, to get you content found, and displayed.