Finding the perfect recipe for a dish can be an arduous and time-consuming task, especially if you want to do a search of multiple recipe sites like Epicurious, Gourmet, and the Food Network for the recipe that best fits your needs. Scripps Network, parent company of the Food Network, has soft launched the beta version of its vast recipe search site Food.com in an effort to solve the problem that most cooks face when they sit down at their computers to find a recipe. Food.com basically searches every reputable recipe site, including Food and Wine, Gourmet, the Food Network, Epicurious, Cooking Light, Martha Stewart, Chow.com and more, and gives you a comprehensive list of possible recipes.
The site provides requisite information from the original site (photos, ingredients, prep time, serving info) but it also lets you filter choices by types of meal, type of cuisine, main ingredient, cooking technique, publication, prep time and diet. It makes searching for recipes similar to searching for flights on Kayak.com. In order to see the full recipe, you are taken to the site where the recipe is originally hosted. The other feature which is worth noting is the ability to drag a recipe that you like into an “online recipe box.” Food.com also allows you to download a toolbar that allows you to drag recipes from all over the Web into your recipe box. And Food.com saves all of your recent searches and activity in a recipe stream. Another cool feature is the ability to upload a recipe and then share it with Food.com’s database.
I did a search for Chicken Marsala on Food.com, Food Network, Epicurious, and Foodista (a Wikipedia for recipes) and Food.com gave me the highest number of choices in recipes, from a variety of sources, and easily allowed me to narrow my search down through its detailed filters. Food.com came up with 368 results, Food Network showed 53 results, Epicurious showed 37 results and Foodista showed 2 results (although, to be fair, Foodista attempts to present the one best recipe)
With the breadth and capabilities of its search capacity and its innovative interface, Food.com is sure to gain a following as a centralized place to not only find recipes but also to store them. One feature that I thought was missing was the ability to filter recipes by chef, which is something that Food Network allows you to do. Epicurious creates a shopping list for the items in the recipes in your recipe box, which is another useful tool when planning a meal. Food.com is currently in beta, so I assume that Scripps will add more features down the line but for an initial trial, the site appears to be a strong addition to the online recipe search space.
neat! i love kayak – can’t believe Food.com didn’t come out earlier.
Who would have thought food.com (domain) will still be in beta. My question is why signup to use a search engine if it is a search engine.
now I am waiting for the day when you will tell us that Google is planning to buy food.com !!!
http://www.goog...294:uw_lnzpxb6m
Yes, agree with earlier comments. Why has it taken Scrippts so long to get this —- only to beta. Also forcing users to register and sign up to use a search engine is a ridiculous barrier to many and very passe i might add. Aside from that, a welcome service provided it works well and delivers an excellent user experience.
Yup – I saw the signup and closed the tab. I don’t see how allrecipe.com escaped an honorable mention here. They’re pretty good.
I know some people involved in this project. Smart types. This is going to be a great site.
I’ve been using a site called RecipeBridge.com for the last 3 months. They are very clean and simple ala Google for recipes. They pull recipes from over 200 cooking websites and blogs.
I love that they have a ‘add to search’ function that helps me narrow down the recipes I want to cook.
unfortunately Recipe Bridge lacks functionality eg: really no different from a google search. filters are weak, no saving of recipes, clicks take you away from the site itself. Food.com provides several useful features, which you may come to realize once the site is out of beta and doesn’t require sign up. and what’s the deal with all of the about.com recipe results? i’ve never used about for recipes.
Melissa – one would hope you are using Recipe Bridge, considering you appear to work there!
Melissa – You’ve been using the site for 3 months as you say here, or the 6 months as you claim in another spam post you left against more positive press Food.com received here: http://www.blis...s-foodcom-beta/
When your site fails, come back and ask us why…
This looks like a winner. After all, how can you go wrong with a domain like food.com for recipes?
I agree with Melissa. RecipeBridge.com has better results. They just need to add a save feature.
Niche is the way forward for aggregation, wrote a blog post about this today.
If you are looking for a site that can import recipes from recipe sites and store them in one place you should also check out http://www.plantoeat.com. The best part is that you can create a meal plan from your recipes, a shopping list from that plan and share your recipes and plans with friends.
This definitely seems like a useful idea. I often end up doing searches across a variety of sites (not to mention blog recipe searches on sites like foodblogsearch.com). It will be interesting to see how they incorporate different social media features to make it more interactive and community-oriented over time. I like the aesthetic!
As for: “Another cool feature is the ability to upload a recipe and then share it with Food.com’s database.”–how are these recipes screened for quality?
But why do I need to register???? I am just going to lie…
I dig recipebridge.com too. You can search by ingredients that you have in your kitchen, plus it’s wicked easy…how can you beat a search of over 200 sites?
Supercook.com has been doing this for a while. Searches 3rd-party recipe sites and matches precisely to ingredients you already have. Also makes ingredient suggestions to enable the most number of additional recipes.
- Tim
I’ve tried many recipe sites and I’m now a big fan of SuperCook.com – because it shows me recipes that I already have the ingredients for first, and then additional recipes based on what I have to buy, it let’s me get to cooking and minimizes my shopping!
I think a domain name plays a very critical role – I think in general if we remember a website people prefer to use it directly than going for a google search.
And then its the preference and comfort factor – I use sidekick for my tickets and never go to any other travel aggregation sites, of I always prefer to use CNN than any other site for news.
Hey folks,
What about this name?
http://www.RecipeScan.com Coming soon…
Not bad – personally I like RecipeBridge.com — very clean and simple layout…sort of like Google…not a lot hassle, just fast well organized results.
Y’all should check it out http://www.RecipeBridge.com
From one avid cook to another…..
Yes but what is a person more likely to remember food.com or recipebridge.com? I think in this case the domain is indeed worth a million bucks.
just signed up for the beta. search is pretty sick, lots of new recipes to try out.
it feels like ying of recipes, to my yang of crazy simple food tracking.
I find http://www.recipebridge.com to be much more complete and easier to use than this new site. I think RecipeBridge indexes hundreds of sites. I’ve had great luck with the search results it provides.
It’s really my favorite because it is so easy and clean to use. It’s elegant in its simplicity.
Give it a try. I don’t think you’ll find any site as good.
Very nice tool! I like the option to save and recommend recipes.
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I agree with comments above re: Recipebridge – it’s way better – super clean & easy w/great results. I especially love the Gourmet filter!
“Finding the perfect recipe for a dish can be an arduous and time-consuming task” Agreed & that’s why this http://blog.lookandtaste.com/ iphone app released today is brill
Struggling already with the cooking so give me one good recipie and on my iphone. Nice.
Google is still King: I lookup a Jamaican recipe call, duckanoo and all the food search engines failed.
I have a friend who is going to love this. What a great idea! No more recipe book as a gift from the mother in law.
This is still the best recipe I have every seen, and I’ve seen over 1.4 million:
http://www.bbqa...on-oven-recipe/
Andy
co-founder RecipeBridge.com
I’ve used the site and its pretty cool.
Side Note:
I don’t hate TC video comments feature. Unless your known no one cares to view your video and everyone hates to see your pimply geeky faces on the side there browser.
I’ve used the site and its pretty cool.
Side Note:
I hate TC video comments feature. Unless your known no one cares to view your video and everyone hates to see your pimply geeky faces on the side there browser.
Interesting story on this domain. It went up for auction via bankruptcy court in 2003 and the Food Network ended up picking it up for $300k (roughly) after Frank Schilling stopped bidding on it. He regrets not going higher.
Crazy that they haven’t really done anything with it for five years. Then again look at all of the domains that went undeveloped with CNET. Now they’ll sit around at CBS.
It’s a shame.
Hmm, food.com does seem to have a pretty fancy interface and I like the integration of the recipe box, pretty slick. However, it seems like it’s basically a different front end for RecipeZaar.com
I can see I am not the only one around who has fallen in love with http://www.recipebridge.com/
I guess the secret is out!
Being a cooking fan, I just want say, I’ve tried both alternatives and found that recipebridge does a much better job of displaying results. They are my choice for food search engines.
-Random Food Lover
Co-founder recipebridge.com
I buy the analogy that food.com:kayak::recipe search:travel search, but where it breaks down is in the revenue model. It isn’t immediately clear to me how food.com will earn enough from the little coupon ad tiles in the right side of the page and the top banner to pay for the site. Kayak gets fees for the deals, but there isn’t a fee that they are earning every time someone uses the recipe.
Hopefully the login will go away after Beta — perhaps it is just providing a low hurdle right ow to keep the number of users down and to actually track use cases for the site to better address beta issues. I can understand logging in to see saved recipes, but just to do a search seems like you will lose a portion of search-ready visitors.
Scripps Networks is no longer a division of E.W. Scripps, but is now its own separate company. Just wanted to make sure Tech Crunch was not misleading anyone
I like RecipeMatcher (http://www.recipematcher.com).
How do you guys determine when something is a soft launch or a regular launch or a big launch?
This is an interest concept for a site. My favorite recipe site is http://www.recipekey.com The site let’s you search for recipes based on the items in your pantry. Hopefully it gets index by food.com as they have a large selection of great recipes.
I trialed food.com a little while ago and it is great at what it does. My only beef is that it is seriously US-centric.
My favourite recipes tend to come from gourmet traveller (AU) and BBC (UK) among others, but they are not indexed (yet?).
If the search could be expanded then I would be in love. Until then it is just the concept that I love.
I have been working on a recipe search engine as well. Mine search revolves around ingredients.
http://www.recipepuppy.com
Wow my grammar sucks. Mine=My
Thank you for Such wonderful information….and if you are a FOODIE, just like me, Check out the blog mentioned below, its really cool. Its got some really cool recipes …….Enjoy !!!!
http://stayshar...es.blogspot.com
my favorite is http://www.bustameal.com it’s more like the itunes of food sites
There’s another site out there that looks to do the same thing. http://www.foodgizmo.com. You don’t have to sign up to do a search and it also allows you to save your recipes into a single recipe box. It also has a social networking aspect in that you can share your recipe box with your friends.
This is a great site, allows you to organize, save, share. My new fav!
As a pastry enthusiast, this info would really help me find recipes that can suit my taste for any day. I hope I can find what I’m looking for there. As of now, I’m more interested in European or Swiss recipes. I actually came across http://swisscoo...s-cookbook.html
and its really helpful. I get to learn not only the recipe but also helpful tips and tricks in preparing food. I hope food.com can also provide this.
Thanks a bunch!
Good to see there are websites with “search engines” for food rather than looking all around on google for a recipe!