Forum

I think it would be helpful if the search feature to find a book/recipe/ingredient was more intuitive. I am finding when I misspell one thing (or get an author's name wrong by 1 letter), or don't put a space between two words (e.g. "rockstar" vs "rock star") I get no results. This would prevent people from missing out on opportunities in the books due to typos or just misunderstanding how the word is formatted in recipe/book title form.

I agree that it would be nice if the search was better at guessing what I meant when I misspelled words (although that is arguably my problem, not theirs).

Also, having indexed a number of books and thus looked very closely at recipe titles, I have decided that cookbook editors allow their authors a truly remarkable the degree of variation in spelling and nomenclature! (which in turn makes it hard to guess how some words are spelled).

But one thing that the search function does really well is provide results that use the various alternate names for ingredients used in the various English-speaking countries.Look for "eggplant" and you will also get "aubergine", "courgettes" when you are looking for "zucchini" (ironic that the first two examples that jumped to mind were actually French words used in English-speaking countries, but you get the idea). It is also very educational. Look for beets, and you will get recipes for beet roots, but also (down the bottom of the list), recipes for chard (which is called silverbeet in other parts of the world). (I confess, I thought this particular search result was an error when I first encountered it!) I've learned a number of fun facts through the search results.

I love the + and - functions to limit searches by ingredient, but I'd like to have an index to the ingredient categorization. I always have a hard time figuring out categories for such things as honey that (at least to my mind) could be considered a baking ingredient, under sweeteners, or perhaps is a pantry staple, etc. (Perhaps there is already such a thing?) Still, I find that in looking for one thing, I often find something else intriguing.

We do try to include spelling variations in ingredient and recipe names so if you search one you get all the rest.  So searching by lasagne or lasagna will show all results for both.  We have added spelling variations of words we know people stumble on - e.g. broccoli, zucchini.  So search by zuchini and you still see all the results. If there are any words you come across that you think should be added as a variation, just email us and we will add it.

But it is impossible for us to guess every mis-spelling that our members may make. Unfortunately we don't have the resources of Google to set that up.

On Vanessa's point about searching for beets showing recipes with chard as it has an alternative name of silverbeet - this can be avoided by using the filters on the right.  Select Ingredients, Vegetables, Root vegetables, Beets and then you will only see the root vegatable - no chard/silverbeet will appear.

When you aren't sure what category an ingredient is classified as in the filters, enter the name in the search box then see which category has the largest number next to it.  It will fairly definitely be the category for that ingredient.

Jane - Thanks for the tip on figuring out which category an ingredient might be in. (I should have realized that myself.) Plus, I think it will lead to more seredipitous finds!

On the other end of things, I'd like the ability to turn the synonym feature *off* for specific searches.  I ran into an issue searching for "long beans" -- namely the Chinese yard-long beans -- which is treated as a synonym for an entire category of beans.  I understand how that came to be, but a search option for "exact ingredient text" would be really nice.

For my own part, I find the huge tree of ingredients rather time-consuming to use.  I'd prefer the option of supplying the ingredient, cuisine etc in the text search box instead, e.g. "cuisine: french ingredient: plums", since that way I wouldn't have to spend a lot of time navigating clickboxes.   Of course, Google power user that I am, I'd also like boolean searching.  Oh, and a pony.  ;-)