Why it matters to you
Millions of people turn to Google to search for recipes and the new carousel will allow for better recipe discovery and could help you get faster results.
If you run a Google search for a recipe, you would typically see a step-by-step process pulled from a food blog or website as the first result. Now, the search function has gotten a little more powerful ahead of the Super Bowl.
When you search the Google app for a recipe you will now see a carousel of suggestions to fine-tune your search results. For example, if you search “cake recipe,” above the search results is a carousel of suggestions ranging from red velvet and lemon to vegan and layer cake.
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Tapping on these will refresh the page with a new card-styled search result that offers ingredients and the recipe rating at a quick glance.
“If you’re planning to make seven-layered dip, a quick search will bring up options ranging from ‘healthy’ to ‘vegan’ to ‘bean dip’ or ‘taco dip’ (to name a few),” writes Duncan Osborn, product manager at Google. “Or type ‘chicken wings’ into the Google app to bring up all kinds of crowd pleasers. Once you select your flavor or category, you’ll see top recipes from a wide variety of sources with easy-to-read step-by-step instructions.”
You can select multiple suggestions at once, and Google will filter the search results to the selected terms. So if you tap on “lemon pound” and “cream cheese,” your first result will be a “lemon cream cheese pound cake.”
The feature seems to be active right now via the Google app on Android and iOS — no update is required. It does seem to be only for mobile devices, though, and it is unclear if the update will ever come to desktop search.