Plus a few other pre-eminent and trusted food-networks (Allrecipes) - searching for "Blueberry Pie" on each one, I'd then scan the quality of the comments - looking for insight into other chefs (cross checking their history to see if they, in turn, can be trusted) who clearly have tried out the recipes, and have made relevant comments. I would then identify the recipe that looked most likely to work for me.
I would expect no less from a sufficiently advanced search engine in this, and all other domains.
The Food Network? Really? The home of "semi-homemade"...? ;-)
About Clarke's law, here's an observation by George Bernard Shaw: "Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."
Quotations aside, the process you're describing is certainly excellent; it's probably what Blekko is trying to pull, in a scalable way. It'll be interesting to watch how it plays out.
The second iteration, of course, is to engage with every (valid, trusted, revenue generating, etc...) customer who searched, determine the quality of the results, and then feed _that_ information back into the algorithms. You could then bias based on domain experts (world class chef's feedback on BlueBerry Pies more important than an anonymous user)
It may be the case that (AllRecipes, TheFoodNetwork, Etc...) are NOT the best place to search for a recipe, and that, indeed, "http://pickyourown.org is knocking it out of the park this week.
There is a lot of room for search to improve - I think the company that beats google (if it's not google that does so first), will be the one that manages to start creating the search<-->Consumer<-->Search feedback quality looop.
Google may already collect enough data to do this. They track clicks on the search results, so they can see whether you liked the results, whether you went back to a different result after visiting your first, and whether you modify your search terms for another search because the first one did not work out.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The winner in search will be the one who strives for that.
If _I_ were presented with "How do I cook a blueberry Pie" - I would immediately do the following search:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/search/delegate.do?fnSearchString...
Plus a few other pre-eminent and trusted food-networks (Allrecipes) - searching for "Blueberry Pie" on each one, I'd then scan the quality of the comments - looking for insight into other chefs (cross checking their history to see if they, in turn, can be trusted) who clearly have tried out the recipes, and have made relevant comments. I would then identify the recipe that looked most likely to work for me.
I would expect no less from a sufficiently advanced search engine in this, and all other domains.