It was never hard to find recipes on the Internet, but Google (GOOG) is making it just a bit easier by providing the option to narrow down search results to only include recipes. Although the service isn't available as of this writing, there is a landing page that explains its features.
Focus Your Search
When you search for a recipe or ingredient on Google, you'll get lots of results, but not all of them will be for recipes. Now you can narrow your search results to show only recipes.
Recipe Info At Your Fingertips
Get help finding the right recipe with ratings, ingredients, and pictures displayed on the results page.
Slice and Dice Your Results
With just a few clicks, you can customize and filter search results to show recipes with your ideal ingredients, cook time and calorie count
Users can filter their results by ingredients, cook time, or calories as well. This sounds like a great tool for looking at what you have in the refrigerator, popping the items into Google, and letting it spit out (sorry, bad term) your options.
For Google, they now have a great advertising platform for food and kitchen goods sales. There is even some code that website developers can put in their pages that will format the results in Google search in a way that is easy to view.
Also, this is a pretty clear area where social media could play a big role. Friends and family recipes clearly trump the random posting on the Internet.
Google Recipe Search should be rolling out in Japan and the US at any second now.