Yesterday, Google introduced a new feature that will tell you how to make cocktails, complete with with step-by-step instructions, ingredient lists, and serving suggestions, says Tech Crunch. The new search feature is a part of Google’s “Knowledge Graph” project, a method of quickly summarizing information gathered from a wide variety of sources right on your search results page. With this new release, cocktails join such other essential Knowledge Graph data as biographies, business listings, and medical symptoms.
To tell you how to mix your favorite drink, Google pulls information from content publishers as well as reference resources like Wikipedia. Because one drink can have a number of variations, the new search function identifies the preferred way of making each cocktail by analyzing the number of hits for different methods and ingredients, serving up just the most popular version.
The function is now available on both desktop and mobile devices; entering any common cocktail name in the Google search field should pull up its recipe card. Google seems to think the new search component will be most often accessed on mobile, when users may be looking up drinks at bars or mixing cocktails at a party themselves. Far more effective than last year’s upgrade of Google’s food recipe search function, this new release is no doubt just a preview of the search giant’s plans to provide even more complicated instructions in the future. Will users trust Google’s crowd-sourced recipes and use them on a regular basis? We’re here to see how it all plays out. [Tech Crunch][Photo: Flickr/Gabriel Amadeus]