Google and Microsoft Food Fight
April 4, 2011
Tensions between Google and Microsoft are rising. The Microsoft assertions that Google is exploiting its search dominance notwithstanding, a more serious battle is on the barbie.
A recent posting on eWeek.com titled “Google Recipe View Offers Search Tool for Foodies” provides an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast two recent additions to the arsenals of the increasingly feuding behemoths. While it seems Microsoft may have thrown the first volley last year, Google’s Recipe View has been impressing the spectators. Beyond Search is no stranger to the topic, as you can read here.
The eWeek posting offers a summary of the facets of Recipe View:
…users choose the right recipe from search results by not only offering ratings and pictures, but providing filters for ingredients, cooking time and calorie count for health-conscious chefs.
You can open the search dramatically by using even broader language, specifying dates or names of individuals.
What of the Microsoft answer to a growing demand from users everywhere? Recipe Search, introduced on Bing in January 2010, failed to light any burners. There seems to be little in the way of methods with which to streamline your query. This was an issue raised in the eWeek posting:
However, it’s important to note the instantiation is different. Do the same … search on Bing and while you’ll see recipe suggestions on the left, there are no ways to slice and dice results the way Google does by ingredients, cooking time and calorie count.
Perhaps the insatiable demand for recipes is due to the recession; more people looking to stretch a dollar are staying home and cooking for themselves? Obviously the attraction to a precise engine which can return highly specialized results is difficult to argue. If that is in fact true, then Google seems well stocked to win this battle of the bulges.
But I am still left wondering if this recipe face-off is just for the sake of competition. Google vs. Bing is becoming a recurring theme these days, no reason to keep it out of the kitchen. After perusing both sites, not to mention the multitude of other tools available to search for recipes, this looks to me to be just another chapter of recycling an idea over and over and over. Kind of like shrimp and grits.
Sarah Rogers, April 4, 2011
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