Amazon's New Search Serves Up Recipes

This summer, the Authors Guild contacted publishers upon learning of the Amazon project; it was assured that authors uncomfortable with the initiative could request that their text be removed.

In the meantime, for online recipe hunters, Search Inside the Book is a treasure trove.

In addition to finding Garten's Potato-Fennel Gratin, cooking mavens can read M.F.K Fisher's prose on a Basic French Omelet ("How to Cook a Wolf"), any of 2,650 definitions from The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson (Oxford Press, 1999), instructions on how to concoct a Flaming Blue Lamborghini ("Miss Charming's Book of Crazy Cocktails,") and anything contained in more than two dozen Betty Crocker titles.

Notably absent from the lineup of searchable text are books by chefs Jamie Oliver, Judy Rodgers, Marcus Samuelsson, Australian author Donna Hay and dozens of other high-profile cookbook authors. Nigella Lawson's "How to Eat" is searchable; her other titles are not.

Here's how Search Inside the Book works: The new feature was integrated into the site's existing search function. After typing in the keyword(s), customers are required to log in; though the search is free, registration with a credit card number is required.

There are two ways to conduct a search. One may search among all the books available or limit the search to the contents of a single book. A search among all the books produces a search-results page listing books relevant to the query and, beneath that, links to those pages of the books that contain all of the keywords. Click on the link to view the actual page from the book; you may also proceed two pages forward or backward.

The text may not be downloaded. And although Amazon does not make it easy to copy or print the text, most any high schooler will know what to do. (To print a screen shot, the user would zoom in on the text of the recipe and hit the "print screen" button on the keyboard. To copy a screen shot, the user would instead hit "ALT" and "print screen;" the text may then be pasted into a document and the rest of the screen shot cropped.) Once 20 percent of the book has been viewed, Amazon stops further browsing in that book for 30 days.

As with any computer search, it pays to be savvy about search terms. If conducting a general search among all book titles, a very specific recipe title search is helpful to weed out irrelevant sources. But knowing that Garten, or any author in particular, is a reliable source of recipes makes a search much easier. A consumer could first search for a particular cookbook, then click on the "Search Inside" logo. To find a recipe within that book, the user should first click on the "Index" button to peruse the list of recipes. Then the user should return to the previous screen, scroll down the page until a green rectangular box labeled "Search Inside This Book" appears and type in the recipe's name.

Several weeks ago, a colleague asked me about finding recipes for red velvet cake. When told that he might have to spend weeks going through cookbooks, he put the request on hold. But last Thursday, in less than 30 seconds on Amazon, he had received 12,956 results.