Let's say you want to compare the nutritional value of two recipes you have in mind for dinner.

You could plug each ingredient into the USDA's national nutrient database, do some conversion equations to reflect the amount of each ingredient called for, add up the sugar, fat and other health factors, and then compare the results.

But startup recipe search engine Foodily is now offering to do this for you — automatically.

The social search engine, which launched in February, pulls in recipes from sites ranging from small food blogs to dominant online recipe publishers like the Food Network. Users can search by ingredients, by excluding specific ingredients, or even by vague terms like “vegan dinner.”

Starting on Monday, they'll also be able to search via terms like "low fat," "low carb" and "high fiber," and able to compare the calories per gram of each recipe (the "per gram" measurement solves the problem ambiguous serving sizes).

All of the data used to make such declarations comes from an ingredient-by-ingredient analysis that uses the USDA's information. The company worked with a professor from the Stanford Prevention Research Center to work out tricky problems like how to exclude ingredients used in preparation but not in the final result.

What this means for dieters, foodies with dietary restrictions and those who cook for them is that it's easy to filter a good chunk of the Internet's recipe box — including crowdsourced sites like Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com — without visiting a niche cooking site or relying solely on unreliable labels like "healthy."

Foodily's founders said back in February that they were aiming to create the Google of food, and it looks like they just got another step closer.





