Recipe search engine launched by former Google employee

Hungry? You can try your luck browsing for a recipe on Google, but you’ll have to find a useful website first. Enter what is advertised as the first ever recipe-based search engine, FoodPair.

Launched in early 2010 by former Google employee Raj Irukulla, the site is designed to find you a meal to suit your mood and ingredients.

You can search by keyword, course, ingredients and source site. The number of filtering options could make it off-putting, but its easy and simple layout actually make it a rather smooth process – and after all, what else would you expect from a former Google employee?

You can register for free, bookmark your favourite recipes and receive recommendations. Also registered users can rate up and mark down the recipes they have tried. It would be nice if explanations were provided with this such as “marked down because I didn’t like the taste” or “thumbs up because it was so easy to do” etc.

The site has recently allowed people to share links through Facebook and Twitter which has led to a steep rise in media and user interest – the site was even listed in the Top 100 Sites of 2010 by PC Magazine.

Much like StumbleUpon, if you’re registered a toolbar will appear at the top of the browser when viewing the recipe’s host site so you can vote it up or down without going back.
I’ve been on a lot of websites that provide recipes from their own database, but never one that searches them. This is one of those ideas that when you hear it you think it should have been around for ages.

Irukulla has stayed loyal to Google by using its Blogger publishing site for the company’s official blog. But other than that the whole project is completely separate.

It will be interesting to see what features this site can develop when it has no information itself but searches other sites.

I can see an interesting leader board developing around the top rated recipes or even further Facebook integration showing what your friends have cooked. But its potential seems limited without expanding into other forms of search.

If I were Larry Page I would be keeping my eye on this venture. Google and all of its competitors don’t have a recipe search engine yet – in my opinion we could be looking at Google’s 84th acquisition.