Recipe View is a new feature introduced by Google that will help users find recipes online.

Sitting alongside key search filters such as Images, Videos, News and Shopping the tool is certainly being given a prominent position on the page, which might come as a surprise until you realise how often web users search for information about food.

Around 1% of all searches performed on Google are for recipes, so with around 1 billion queries on Google every day, that’s 10 million recipe searches daily. Time to take it seriously and get aggregating all that information out there.

As Product Manager Kavi Goel explains in the Google blog, Recipe View is part of ongoing efforts by Google to to enrich the search experience using structured data. Website owners just need to add rich snippets markup when adding their recipes, which ensures that the content is presented in the best way possible in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View.

‘This release is an exciting technical milestone for our team since it’s first time we’ve built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data,’ says Goel.

Whereas before to find a recipe you could only use the general search box, now you’ll be able to search by seasons or events and filter number of calories, cooking time or by ingredient. So you can find a low-fat, meat-free lasagne which takes less than an hour to cook, for example, without having to trawl through lots of different recipes on different food websites.

It may favour the bigger sites and of course those who are happy to optimise their content in this way. Talking about the US version which is now live, Chicago Tribune foodie section The Stew says, ‘Expect a lot of FoodNetwork.com and AllRecipes.com recipes to pop up on the first page of any search.’

Recipe View will soon become available in the UK and it should be a no-brainer for the likes of BBC Food, Delia Online, Jamie Oliver et al to be part of it. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a regional element built in to ensure that UK users see recipes from UK websites first. Or if the bigger American sites will still rise to the top, confusing Brits by telling them to add a half stick of butter and two cups of heavy cream to the skillet.

Here’s a cheesy video (ho ho) starring Google chef Scott Giambastiani who explains how Recipe View will work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsUN1dUbbM8