How does the recipe search powered by DigitalNZ work?

Posted on 19 August 2009 by Thomasin

The DigitalNZ recipe search is made using our free search builder application. It helps you find content related to the Bake it Digital campaign.

Making a search tool is really easy - you can make one on any topic you like, and bring up results from any Digital New Zealand content sources.

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/about/custom-search-builder

Making a search

Here's how we used the tool to make the recipe search. We:

1) Decided to just include certain types of content: Images, Magazines, News and Newspapers

2) Added our keywords, using some Boolean magic.

Boolean lets you combine terms using logic such as ‘AND', ‘OR' and ‘NOT' to get just the results you want included in your search. For example:

  • Fire AND truck to get just fire trucks

  • Fire NOT truck to get just fire

  • Fire OR truck to get fires and trucks

Here's our current Boolean search string: recipe OR #nzbakeit OR nzbakeit OR id:1220996 OR id:1220998 OR id:1220999 OR id:1221000 OR id:1221001 OR id:1221002 OR id:1221003 OR id:1221004 NOT id:197862 OR id:197812

You can see we're deliberately filtering out some dud results (such as chicken cartoons) using NOT, and trying to include others we particularly want. Drop us a line in the comments if you want to know how to cherry pick like this.

Using OR means we get a bigger search pool - content is either described using the word 'recipe' OR has the id:1220996, for example. If we didn't add anything in the Keywords, we'd get everything from the content sources we chose.

3) Chose some particular content sources we knew had recipes - our Flickr group members, Kete friends (such as Kete Horowhenua, and people using the Kete DigitalNZ), and some other institutions.

4) Styled it up and added a logo, and then pressed save. Easy!

The result

And here's the final recipe search powered by DigitalNZ. If you click Search without anything in the search box, you can browse all the recipes currently included.

Can't find the recipe you're looking for?

There are likely two reasons:

The nice thing about Flickr and the Kete is you can go in and tag other people's recipes yourself so they can be found. One day we'll let you do this inside Digital New Zealand too.

Happy searching and baking!


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