Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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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. Read more