Google recipe search...

[Mcarle]

I just did a search for a recipe and saw something new.

Google has  a sidebar that lets you toggle on/off ingredients...

Pretty nifty, and interesting.

I did not have the recipe toggle marked, I was just using regular search "everything"

[Runner2009]

I believe last summer Google, Yahoo and Bing all agreed to support microdata - which is part of the HTML5 specifications (correct me if I am wrong).  The specifications are at http://schema.org

For recipes there is a specific schema http://schema.org/Recipe  This will produce the rich snippets that you witnessed.  You can test out your recipes etc for rich snippets by using the Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippets Tester at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Supposedly there are three types of formats that will produce rich snippets; microformats (hCard etc ..), micordata and RDF.  I can tell you from experience that it does work (not for all schemas) and works quickly.

It has been my experience that the plugins for Wordpress for producing rich snippets are a bit clumsy and most seem to use the microformats instead of the microdata.

I would recommend using the microdata, one because it is supported by the major search engines and two it is part of the HTML5 specifications

I do not believe that having the microdata encode on your web helps with rankings, but I can say that it can dramatically increase your CTRs.

Runner2009

Burt Gordon

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, that happened almost a year go.. See http://microformats.org/2011/02/24/google-launches-microformat-powered-recipe-search It's pretty neat and works great. Very user-friendly. And since it's done using microformats / recipe schema, it's pretty easy to implement. There are tons of Wordpress plugins that let you do that.