It’s an experience most of us know all too well: open a food blogger’s recipe to wade past a mountain of content you don’t care about to actually get to the ingredients and method. Google is testing a feature that could eliminate this step, although it is the result of the company’s own policy.
noticed a new button called Quick View in thumbnails for selected recipes. This button brings up the full recipe without leaving the search results page. In their testing, a search for “chocolate chip cookie recipe” revealed this Quick View button for the Preppy Kitchen site.
“We’re always experimenting with different ways to connect our users with high-quality and useful information,” Google representative Brianna Duff told Engadget about these Quick View recipes. “We’ve partnered with a limited number of creators to start discovering new recipe experiences in search that both benefit users and add value to the web ecosystem. We have nothing to announce at this time.” Although Google has contracts with participating bloggers, the company declined to disclose further details about the scope of this test.
As far as online recipes go, this one from Google is pretty interesting. Home cooks may find this Quick View feature appealing, as many food blogs load up their posts with photos and personal stories before sharing a recipe. But it was Google’s own rules that drove bloggers to this approach in the first place, longer posts are generally indexed higher in search results and thus get more traffic. (No offense to the food bloggers of the world, but the only chocolate chip cookie recipe you need is the one on the back of the chocolate chip bag.)
While this recipe feature is just an early test, Google is rolling out other tools aimed at keeping users on their web pages and platforms. The one of the latest in search (and ) ways a company can change employment rules for web content.
