Google has responded to its user’s demand for recipes by creating a new recipe search engine. The engine links users to recipes on sites like Epicuious and the Food Network while allowing people to search not just by food item, but also by calorie count, preparation time, and ingredients.

A full 1% of all searches performed on Google are for recipes. Seeing the demand, Google has taken advantage of its own Rich Snippets to create an intuitive recipe search engine. According to the article, “the entire search is built on structured data that webmasters have built into their webpages using markup code that’s invisible to humans but is extremely useful to machines. The dream of the so-called semantic web is built upon the idea that web pages will be full of such underlying tags.”

Jack Menzel, Google’s product management director for search, “estimates that only hundreds of recipe sites are currently wrapping their published recipes in meta-data, but they include biggies like the Food Network and Epicurious (which, like Wired.com, is owned by Condé Nast). And he hopes the recipe search engine will lead developers to create easy ways for every day bloggers to do the same.

Reps from Google will lead a discussion about Rich Snippets at SemTech 2011 this June.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ ukcider

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