Google's New Recipe Search declared a failure by food writers.

Just over a month ago, Google announced its new recipe search view, promising that you can "slice and dice" your recipe search results according to recipe-specific qualities such as ingredients, cook time, and calories. Apparently 1% of searches in Google, about 1 billion per month, are for recipes. That's a lot! So creating a view for recipes is certainly worthwhile.

But at the end of Google's exciting announcement is a little poison pill. Recipe view is based on rich snippets markup which are markup formats such as microformats and RDFa that annotate your pages for Google. Huh? Meathead Goldwyn broke the rich snippets markup formats down into plain English a few weeks ago at the Huffington Post, but also declares "It's killing me." Lydia Walshin from The Perfect Pantry describes at BlogHer how posts that have earned a high page rank in regular search now disappear in recipe view because she hasn't included the required specialized formats. Instead, copy-cat recipes from massive, crowd-sourced recipe sites such as AllRecipes.com and Food.com show up for the queries her posts used to rank for. With over 800 recipes posted in her blogs over five years, going back and adding rich snippet markups is insurmountable, even with a plugin. Amanda Hesser writes at Food52 (cross posted at TechCrunch) how google's solution to recipe search seems "robotic rather than thoughtful." Slicing and dicing by author provided cooking times and calorie counts sways the results towards quickie diet recipes rather than real quality.

It seems there's a growing consensus that Google's Recipe View is a failure for favoring a few massive sites over the thousands of food bloggers who produce quality over quantity. What's your take? How do you estimate the quality of a recipe online? What would you like to see in the perfect recipe search engine?