Searching for Recipes

This post is about searching for recipes on our website, and a little bit about searching the internet in general.

The inspiration for covering the topic of search came from emails asking us to remind readers of a link to a recipe they clearly remember seeing on the site somewhere, but can't quite recall where. Of course, browsing through all the recipes one by one would take far too long — especially when you can take advantage of a search engine.

So, at the very top of every page on our site there is a link to the site search page. We use Google search, which offers a number of benefits: it supports different word forms, you can make a typo in a word, or enter words in any order. Just type the name of the recipe you're looking for into the field (say, «rosettes»), click the «Search» button, and voilà — the pastries are found and the link to the recipe appears in first place among the results.

We'd also like to share a handy trick that Google or Yandex (whichever you prefer) allows you to use when searching, but that not everyone knows about. If you open a search engine and want to find something only on a specific website (for example, on kamelena.com/ru), you need to add "site:kamelena.com/ru" to your search query in the search bar.
So our search query, regardless of which search engine you use, would look like this: "site:kamelena.com/ru rosettes". And as a result, we get all the links to pages on our site, the first of which will be a link to the delightful recipe for apple pastry roses.

In general, search engines are capable of much more than we usually give them credit for. What search engine do you use, and do you ever take advantage of its hidden features?

Author: Alexey Khaletsky