February 24, 2011. Google introduces a new product: something they call “Recipe View”.
As food bloggers, we were all terribly excited. Recipes are what we do. We don't just cook dinner... we spend hours perfecting a dish, make our families wait an extra ten minutes so we can get the perfect photos while the food is still fresh, and then spend even more time processing photos and writing blog posts to make our readers salivate. A search, just for recipes? It's like it was made for us. So of course, right away we loaded Google in our browser, clicked on the Recipe View... and immediately Googled ourselves. You know you all did. Whether it was one of our most popular posts, or just a term we knew we ranked highly in, we typed it into the search box, and...
... we were nowhere to be found. For me, it was 'sushi'. I have a sushi blog, with about 200 sushi recipes. So you'd think... I should totally dominate the sushi search, right? Well, I wasn't on the first page... but, you know, I can deal with that. It's only Recipe View's first day public, maybe they're still working out the kinks. Second page... still nothing. Third page... nuh uh. Fourth, fifth... there were a total of eight pages of search results. That's less than 80 results. I definitely have more than 80 sushi recipes. And not a single result was one of mine. Instead, you see results from sites such as AllRecipes, Food Network... even a candy "sushi" recipe from about.com. And it wasn't just me. We all searched, expecting to see our websites, our fellow food bloggers' websites... but all that came up were the big aggregate recipe sites.