ResearchBuzz

Trying to figure out what you’re going to do with half a leftover turkey and fifteen pounds of sweet potatoes? Yahoo wants to help you out with its newly-announced search shortcut for recipes.

The search is in the form of a syntax: just search for an ingredient and the word recipes and you’ll get links to recipes and cuisine types at the top of the search results page. A search for mushroom recipes, for example, returns Sausage and Mushroom Soup, Tofu with Tomato-Mushroom Sauce, and other recipes from Food & Wine and EatingWell.com. (Currently 14 different providers are being used for the recipes.) Recipes have ratings, and some of the listings I saw (beef recipes) broke out the available recipes into cuisines.

Multiple-word queries get mixed results. If, for example, I try chicken and mushroom recipes, I will get recipe links at the top of the results page. chicken and avocado recipes brings just regular search results, however.

In addition to searching for ingredients you can also search for types of cuisine. A search for Italian olive recipes found goodies like Rosemary Focaccia with Olives and Osso Buco with Tomatoes, Olives, and Gremolata. Alas, Italian olive and chicken recipes did not provide a shortcut.

There are also some special dietary considerations you can use in your search as well, though they appear more limited. Try low fat recipes, or vegan recipes, or kosher recipes, or gluten free recipes. You can search for types of recipes, within reason. Try stew recipes or greens recipes. I also had a limited amount of success searching by cooking method — broil recipes or deep fried recipes.

The only bad thing about this shortcut is that it doesn’t seem able to handle lots of ingredients. I guess if I look in the fridge and all I have is an onion, some leftover ham, and a half-a-jar of olives, I could use Cookin’ With Google or a regular Web search. On the other hand, if I need a quick recipe for a mud pie and don’t need to fool with ingredients, this Yahoo shortcut is fast and useful!

Yahoo puzzles me. For the longest time it developed a lot of clearly-related consumer properties — movies, TV, real estate, etc. — and it did things like buy Flickr and Del.icio.us.

But then it released Yahoo Pipes, which programmers have used to create any number of cool data mashups. And then Yahoo announced that it’s launching an open source program to advance the research and development of systems software for distributed computing.

Not that this isn’t cool; it is. Not that Yahoo’s consumer properties aren’t good; they are. It just seems like there are two very different forces of growth here.

Okay, so about this new initiative. According to the press release, the new effort is for levering Yahoo’s leadership in Hadoop, which is an open source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation. (Hadoop’s at http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/ .

Yahoo’s planning to make Hadoop available (in a data center) for the academic community for software resource. This supercomputing cluster is called the M45 and will run Hadoop (of course) and other open source distributed computing software.

This is a bit over my head. If it’s a bit over yours, you can check out the blog post on Yodel Anecdotal, which gives a little more background information, or the new Yahoo Hadoop blog, which at the moment has only one post.

Jeremy Zawodny mentioned on his blog the launch of Yahoo Developer Network Theater, available at http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/ .

The site includes a variety of videos and screencasts covering a variety of topics relevant to developers, including AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML), JavaScript, and APIs of all sorts. There’s also covering of different Yahoo Events and interviews with various luminaries. (There’s an RSS feed that you can use if you want to subscribe to the videos.)

The videos are very different in their presentation. Some of them are full video, but one I looked at was mostly still photographs with audio over it and reminded me a little of “Tom Goes to the Mayor” (in a good way.) Unfortunately the audio quality varies as well, some of it superb and some of a little hard to hear.

I will confess to your right now that most of this stuff is way over my head. So maybe I’m just missing the point when I say that I would like to see different categories, like “Case Studies,” or “How-To”. Or maybe for APIs? It’s easy enough to browse the categories NOW, but I’m wondering what it’s going to be like as more and more videos are generated on more and more specific topics. I’m excited to see what’s here — gotta get into those JavaScript videos — but I want to be able to find, and follow, more later.