I was so excited when CHOW, my favorite food magazine ever, found new life as a marvelous website (that coincidentally features the fabulous design skills of my foodie friend Olivia). But work and life keep me so busy I don’t get over there as often as I would like to read and be inspired to cook new things.
And now yahoo! has jumped into the foodie fray, launching http://food.yahoo.com/ this week. It aggregates content from a variety of other sources (like Rachel Ray, Food and Wine, and Martha Stewart), including some food bloggers.
I can’ really quite get a handle on how I’d use the site yet — there’s just so much stuff crammed into the homepages/landing pages. And you have to navigate carefully to avoid searching an advertiser’s website rather than one of the food.yahoo tools.
I tried out the "dining guide" and was not impressed. How can a normal person wade through 8989 results? They tell you to click through for reviews on yahoo local…but if you can’t click to sort by some sort of criteria, you’re really not giong to be able to find a restaurant, are you? If it was a small town with 10 restaurants the dump of search results might work, but for a major city like San Francisco, this is nowhere near being a dining guide.
I looked around for some time to try to find an "about us" type of page, to see what the mission of this new mini portal is, exactly. But I never found one. I did find a page full of foodie blogger posts tho, so that at least gave me some non-repurposed content to look at.
My best guess is they were aiming to create a one-stop reference/resource for foodies, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark with me.