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.
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.
How to get your blog included in Food Blog Search
Food Blog Search enables food bloggers, publishers, and recipe seekers to find high quality recipes from food blogs. For example, the food content editors at BlogHer, BonAppetit.com, Serious Eats, and other sites regularly highlight recipes from food bloggers. Food Blog Search is a tool that they might use to more easily find interesting recipes published by food bloggers. Many food bloggers use the search tool to add links on their owns posts to relevant content from other food blogs.
Food Blog Search is maintained by a handful of food bloggers, who use the search engine themselves, to find recipes and food bloggers to highlight on their own blogs. Since Food Blog Search is a Google custom search engine, there is a limit to how many blogs we can include in the index.
In order for a food blog to be considered for inclusion in the search engine, and to ensure that Food Blog Search continues to offer high-quality search results, blogs must meet the following criteria:
- The blog must clearly promote other food blogs, with a blogroll. The blogroll must be viewable on every recipe page that you would want included in the search index. If you keep your blogroll on a separate page, a highly visible link to the blogroll must be viewable on every recipe page that you want included in the search index. Please note that the "Foodie Blogroll" widget does NOT count as a blogroll for our purposes.
- The blog should be a current, active blog, at least one year old, with at least 4 entries posted per month.
- The blog subject must be food and cooking, with at least a third of the content should be recipes.
- The recipes must be mostly original or adapted and not copied word for word from other sites. Any recipes taken from other sources should be properly credited, linked to the source if possible, and rewritten in your own words.
- The recipes should follow scratch-cooking methods with whole food ingredients.
- The recipes should include attractive, original photographs or illustrations.
- The recipes should include stories or substantial headnotes that set the recipe in a personal context.
- The primary language of the blog must be English.
- The blog should include easy-to-locate contact information (email or a contact form, or link to a "Contact me" page).
If your blog meets all of these criteria, your blog may be considered by one or more of the administrators for inclusion in the search engine. Please note that meeting these criteria does not automatically qualify your site for inclusion. Basically we are looking for sites that we would want to find if we did a search in Food Blog Search. In particular we are looking for high quality content—excellent photos, recipes, writing—by food bloggers who are generous with the food blogging community, who promote other food bloggers on their sites. The rational is this: we like to promote others who also promote others. So, the final test of inclusion is subjective.
Since running Food Blog Search is done in our spare time, we will evaluate sites as we can. If you submit information about your blog, and we choose to include it in Food Blog Search we will make an effort to send you an email to that effect. If you have submitted your site and we decide to not include it, you will not hear from us. If you do not hear from us after a month after submitting an application, you are welcome to apply again.
Note that 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, or blogs that violate the intellectual property rights of others.
Note also that we are mostly interested in food blogs that have wide appeal. Food blogs that focus on highly restrictive diets are generally encouraged to find custom search engines that are tailored to those restrictive diets. This is because we have only a limited number of spots in this custom search engine, and we would like the sites listed here to have the broadest possible appeal.
If your site meets that criteria, you may submit it.
Who are we?
Food Blog Search is maintained by food bloggers Elise Bauer, Kalyn Denny, and Lydia Walshin. The lovely illustrations in the banners were created by Ximena Maier of Lobstersquad.