NY Times has an interesting article on how recipe searches on the internet are gaining huge interest among women:
Roughly 50 million people, or one-third of active Internet users in the United States, visited food sites in May, Mr. Cassar said, with sites like foodnetwork.com and kraft.com attracting more than seven million people. If recent and expected changes are any indication, these visitors are looking for friends as much as they are seeking recipes.
Condé Nast’s epicurious.com late last month introduced My Epi, a set of online tools perhaps best characterized as Facebook for foodies. Readers have long been able to compile their own recipe collections on the site. But now users on Epicurious, which was among the earliest recipe-sharing destinations on the Web, can search the virtual recipe boxes of other users, create profile pages for themselves and sift through profiles of other users with whom they may share similar interests.
In the coming months, marthastewart.com, the online division of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, will also allow users to collect, share, rate and review recipes with other users on the site. “And that’ll just be the beginning of our community and personalization initiative,” said Jody Jones, the editorial director of the Web site. “These are big growth areas for us.”