When you’re looking for a recipe, you probably start by going to Google or your favorite cookbook, right? Well, there’s a new website that’s about to make your life a whole lot easier. Foodily (short for “food I love you”) is a social food search engine that has indexed the recipes of all the major food websites to offer up great looking recipe-card results.
Foodily
Publisher: Foodily, Inc.
Cost: Free
URL: www.foodily.com
From the home page you’re greeted with two search fields. The first allows you to enter the name of the recipe you’re craving—the predictive search makes this easy—and the second is an optional field to filter out ingredients that you would like to skip. The recipe results come from all the major players including, AllRecipes.com, Cooks.com, The Food Network, Simple Recipes, Epicurious.com, Food.com and many more. Results from celebrity chefs and cooks also appear, i.e., Martha Stewart, Jamie Oliver and Giada De Laurentiis. The results display the recipe source, a star rating, cook time, and number of ingredients followed by the ingredient list. Because Foodily has indexed all the ingredients, you’re able to narrow your results by asking it to display only recipes that contain or withhold specific items—very handy for those with dietary restrictions or empty pantries. A details link will open up the ingredient list to show the cooking instructions and peer reviews. Unlike the garbled results you get when going through a search engine, Foodily displays recipe cards with images (when available) side-by-side for easy comparison.
If you have friends who are connected to Foodily through Facebook, their favorite recipes should display first in your results—and that’s just the start of your social connection. When you find recipes you like, you can save your favorites and put together menus. These menus can be labeled (I created a Taco Thursday menu) and then shared with your friends on Facebook. You can even create a Facebook event with the click of a button. Foodily promotes these menus on the home page, but you can set yours to “private” if you choose. There’s also the obligatory Facebook “like” button if you want some quick and easy social connection.
In general the site is beautifully designed and the results are high quality. There are a few things I was disappointed with. No video or video instruction. No ingredient information. And no Twitter. Also, I have a favorite blueberry pie recipe from the Food Network that didn’t show up. This is a recipe that’s saved in my Food Network recipe box; I was hoping the two recipe boxes would connect, but they don’t. In fact, I have to go to the Food Network website if I want my delicious blueberry pie. Maintaining two boxes could be a hassle.
Lastly, since this site is all about connecting lovers of food, it would be nice if our own recipes could be shared. If not in the results, which is understandable that they don’t, at least it should allow me to add a recipe to my own menu. If I’m inviting friends over, they’ll want to know that my specialty is on the menu.
Foodily looks great, smells good and the first bite is delectable, but a little seasoning will go a long way.
Toque Rating: 4/5
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