Recipe Sites that Taste 2.0: CookThink.com

Continuing on with my quest to find the best, 2.0-esque recipe site, I’ll review CookThink.com. Last week I took a look at GroupRecipes.com, which fared relatively well on the 4 criterium: Food Porn, Inventory, Inspiration, and Ease-of-Use. CookThink is actually the site which inspired this series of posts, as I was passed on a review from TechCrunch a little while back. Let’s see how well CookThink does, shall we?

Upon first visiting CookThink I must admit, I was quite confused. I tried putting in a few search terms and received no results, then clicked around to receive results that I hadn’t asked for. The site is based mainly on tags and the initial welcome screen is a clean, Google-esque search form. It seems to be less community based than GroupRecipes. Community is not a major component of a great recipe site in my opinon, but it’s a nice addition. Let’s see how it does on the 4 points:

Food Porn- 6
There are some small photos associated with many dishes, but nothing particularly exciting.

Inventory- ?
If I were able to actually find related recipes, I could tell you but after unsuccessfully searching fava bean, porcini, and ceviche I’ve come up empty handed.

Inspiration- 5
The site is well designed but nothing sexy is taking place. I feel like I’m doing work here trying to find a recipe and am certainly not inspired.

Ease-of-Use- 5
After visiting this site three times, I still don’t understand it. I put in “porcini mushroom” and I get a tag cloud of “related” words that seem completely unrelated. Why don’t I get recipes? This seems like an unnecessary added step. The tags that came up are: chicken, poblano, fish, greek yogurt. Huh?And if I click through, I see nothing about porcini in the recipes.

GroupRecipes is far better than CookThink. Does anybody feel otherwise? Stay tuned for my next post when I’ll review OpenSourceFood!

Filed under Food 2.0 |