About Food Blog Search
Food blogs are a wonderful source of recipes, stories, and opinions about food. These blogs are the labors of love of countless people from around the world who are so passionate about what they cook and eat they spend hours photographing and writing about it. Food bloggers usually give much more information and personal touches to what they write about than commercial cooking or recipe sites. Search for a recipe among food blogs and you'll often be delighted by the hidden jewels you uncover.
Food Blog Search is a custom built search engine specifically for searching recipes in food blogs. It is intended to be a useful tool for food bloggers and for scratch cooks looking for recipes and inspiration. Food Blog Search uses Google technology, through the Google Custom Search Engine program. Started in October 2006, Food Blog Search now searches over two thousand hand-selected, high quality food blogs. More and more food blogs are added to the list of sites searched every day.
The best way to use the search engine
In a word, be specific. "Apple tart" will give you many more useful results (if you are looking for apple tart recipes) than "apple recipes". The larger, more established blogs will tend to show up highest in the search results because that's just how Google's search function works. So be ready to page through the results to find results from newer blogs.
Add to your Google homepage
If you've personalized your Google homepage, you can add a Food Blog Search gadget to your homepage. All you have to do is click on this button:
When you use your Google home page, the Food Blog Search bar will appear on it:
Add to Google Toolbar
Do you use Google Toolbar? If so, you can easily add a Food Blog Search button to your Google toolbar. This way you can easily search for recipes using Food Blog Search at any time as you browse the web. Works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Add to Firefox Search
The Firefox browser allows you to customize the search bar in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window. The default is Google, but if you click on the arrow next to the Google icon, you can search other sites such as Amazon, Yahoo, or eBay. To add Food Blog Search to the list of sites you can search in the Firefox search window, click here to install the custom search plugin for Food Blog Search.
How to get your blog included in the Food Blog Search engine
Please note that the purpose of Food Blog Search is to be a tool for foodbloggers and scratch cooks searching for recipes. It is not meant to be a comprehensive search engine of all food blogs. For this reason there are strict guidelines that must be met in order to be considered for inclusion. The criteria are:
- Written in English
- Subject is food and cooking
- Is at least three months old, with at least 30 entries
- Provides a substantial number of recipes, most original or adapted and not just copied word for word from other sites
- Any recipes taken from other sources must be properly credited, and preferably rewritten in your own words.
- All recipes include accompanying stories or substantial headnotes (at least a paragraph)
- All recipes include attractive original photos or illustrations
- Follows classic scratch-cooking methods with whole food ingredients
- Presented in a blog format, including comments
- Is a current, active blog, with at least 2 entries a month
- Includes an "About" section with information about the blog author(s)
- Evidence that the blog supports the food blogging community, for example, ample links to other food blogs in entries, a blogroll with several food blogs mentioned, and/or display of the Food Blog Search widget or button on the blog.
ALL CRITERIA MUST BE MET TO BE CONSIDERED FOR INCLUSION.
Is your food blog included in the search engine? You can check by doing a search for your blog's title or URL. If your blog shows up in the results, it's being searched.
If you have a food blog that isn't currently included in the search engine, and it meets all of the aforementioned criteria, we'd love to know about it. Send a note to us at admin AT foodblogsearch [dot} com and we'll get to it within a week or so. Note that if you have clearly not read the list of requirements before submitting a request for inclusion, it is likely that your request will be completely ignored.
We are not interested in adding blogs that appear to have been created purely to take advantage of Adsense, large commercial food company blogs, blogs too focused on self-promotion, blogs that violate the intellectual property rights of others, or blogs that participate in paid product reviews such as PayPerPost. To protect the trust between food bloggers and food blog readers, we reserve the right to exclude blogs which do not meet our selection criteria.
Add a Food Blog Search Widget to your website
Help your readers search fabulous food blogs by adding a search widget to your site:
Just click on these instructions for adding a Food Blog Search Widget to get the code.
Who are we?
Food Blog Search is maintained by food bloggers Elise Bauer, Kalyn Denny, and Alanna Kellogg. The lovely illustrations in the banners were created by Ximena Maier of Lobstersquad.