Bing-ing nutrition data and recipes to one search

January 25, 2010 by Colby
Filed under: Nutrition 2.0, Search Engine 

You likely have heard of Bing through their heavy advertising campaign.  If not, Bing is a search engine; Microsoft’s answer to Google’s dominance in search.  Though right now there are not many reasons to switch from Google if you are used to it, Bing is adding some interesting features that may be of use to some health enthusiasts.

First, if you regularly read the blog you have seen some of the nutrition related calculations WolframAlpha can do.  Recently Bing partnered with WA and added the ability to do WA queries through Bing.  So searching for particular health related data (or any subjects WA can do) on Bing will show an answer calculated by WA.   Though some of the questions need to be phrased very specifically to get a calculation, this will only get better as WA improves.

Second, Bing now shows recipes when searching for foods from websites such as epicurious.com, MyRecipes.com, and more into one list.  Bing also compares recipe calorie and fat content between recipes, and clicking on each shows Ingredients, Directions, and more detailed Nutritional Information.  Even better, on the left hand side there are a number of filtering options to narrow your search to find specific recipes.  You can filter by rating, cuisine, convenience, occasion, main ingredient, course, and cooking method.  See the video below.

Both features give Bing an edge on Google in the race to a semantic web.  As search engines improve in their ability to identify data, they become more useful as information sources.

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