Three flavors of vertical search: Bing / Supercook / Food Network
by Vladimir Zelevinsky
Vladimir Zelevinsky
It’s no secret that a good number of people who work at Endeca are foodies (I hereby confess the authorship of the bagel in the last photo). So it’s highly exciting to hear that a major search engine (Bing, probably not related to a cherry variety) is adding vertical search for recipes.
This is obviously a great idea. What is in tamales? How to cook elk? What to do with carambola? All at your fingertips. The recipes come with star ratings, estimated calories and fat, and the link to the site where the recipe originated. Very nice.
The issues start appearing when the engine behaves in unpredictable ways. Search for spaghetti provides an option to look at the recipes; lasagna does not. Search for tofu returns the recipe UI; tofu lemongrass does not, and there’s no way to even tell the search engine that I’m looking for recipes. Even the explicit searches for tofu lemongrass recipe or tofu lemongrass recipes bring back only the usual list of web pages – not the detailed cooking-specific UI. There’s also no way to refine tofu recipes to filter the ones that use lemongrass.
The problem, I think, is that Bing is a general search engine that tries to deduce the user’s search intent – and if it suspects the user wants to search for recipes, it includes the UI. This is a black-box decision, and there’s no way to explicitly affect this behavior.
To avoid this problem, let’s look at the search engine that only indexes recipes. My favorite site for this task, far and above, is SuperCook. This is probably the most elaborate interface of its kind, allowing to search for recipes that use particular ingredients, that use only particular ingredients, that do not use particular ingredients – and, in a brilliant stroke, tells you what else you need to acquire to make a particular recipe (more details here)!
This answers a very specific search need: here’s what I have in my fridge. What can I make? What do I need to run to the store for?
And yet, and yet – I find that however much I admire SuperCook, I use it only occasionally. Each time I click on a recipe link and discover it comes from the site that doesn’t remotely work with my cooking preferences, I get discouraged. The problem here is that the highly specific UI searches a plethora of recipe sites – and some of these sites tend to have recipes I don’t care for.
So I end up giving up on Bing’s vertical subset of a general search and on SuperCook’s ultra-customizable aggregate search, and go back to a single recipe site I like. Sometimes, it’s Food Network (disclaimer: Endeca client); sometimes, it’s Epicurious; always, it’s something where I’m in control.
It might be curious to look into what users tend to prefer: one stop search hub vs. dedicated search of a repository they trust. This is not limited to recipe search, of course; I’m certain other vertical searches (e.g., travel) would show a similar pattern.
Generally speaking, the web behaves like a giant faceted browser. Selecting one search engine vs. the other one is the very first facet the user tends to specify.
on February 22, 2010 at 3:31 pm
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You should check out Recipe Puppy and Cook Thing. Two vertical food search engines I created.
on February 22, 2010 at 5:22 pm
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Hi Vladimir,
I’m Assaf, the founder of Supercook. Just wanted to let you know that I found this post very informative. You’ve brought up some excellent points. Thanks!
on February 24, 2010 at 4:42 pm
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Assaf:
Thanks; glad to be helpful.
Kris:
Interesting links. I didn’t get far with Recipe Puppy (my test search returned 1365 recipes, and I didn’t quite know how to explore this result set) – however, with Cook Thing I think you’ve hit on something very interesting. The page you see after the search (“Select the ingredients you want to use”) acts both as the refinement page – and also as a summary page, telling me a lot about whatever I typed in the search box. Pictures help a lot, too, providing a lot of information scent. Well done.