'Tis the season for some serious baking, cooking, and recipe planning, and since I am a bit of a recipe junkie, I've been compiling a long list of great dishes I can't wait to try out via the Web.

Doing a recipe search by ingredient is useful, especially if you've got a few food items and no idea how to put them together. You can use any search engine you like to do this; simply input your ingredient, say, "chicken", and then "recipes". Got more than one ingredient? No problem: try chicken+lemon recipes (a little bit of Boolean search there).

There are also a few recipe search engines that let you search for multiple ingredients easily. For example:

• CookingByNumbers.com
• Supercook: recipe search by ingredients you have at home
• Cookstr
• FoodieView - The Recipe Search Engine
• Search for Recipes by Ingredient - Recipe Puppy

Do you have a favorite recipe search tip or recipe search site? Please share in the comments.

More fun with food on the Web

• Droogle - a Drink Recipe Search Engine
• Home Cooking Recipes
• Southern Food and Recipes
• Low Fat Cooking
• Busy Cooks Quick and Easy Cooking and Recipes

I've long been a fan of Clusty, a meta search engine with lots of interesting features, such as a government-specific search utility. Clusty has a great new optimized interface for the Nintendo Wii so you can browse it more easily via the Web; you can find it at wii.clusty.com. Best feature? Large buttons so you don't make time-consuming mistakes with your Wii controller.

Related:

Search the Web with Nintendo Wii: Between championship games of baseball with my kids on the Nintendo Wii, I've had the chance to scope out a few Wii-friendly browsers and sites made specifically to search the Web from the Wii console, and here's what I've turned up so far.

A lot of fun stuff happened this week in the world of Web search, so let's get right to it:

• Google Swirl offers fun ways to explore images: Google has opened up a new way to find images, and it's just swirl-y (sorry 'bout that).
• Yahoo Brings 'Real Time' Updates To News Shortcut: Yahoo is coming to the table with integrated Twitter feeds; Bing, Google unveiled a Twitter search option about a month ago.
• Survey uncovers the UK's favorite websites: Some very interesting choices here.
• Twitter Premium Accounts Coming by Year's End: Premium accounts are best for those folks who need better analytics and advanced Twitter features.
• Google Builds Out A National Real Estate Search Engine: Google already rolled out searchable real estate back in July (Google Maps: now with real estate listings), but now it's got even more great features (convenient for looky-loos).
• Future Directions of Wolfram|Alpha: Fun stuff in store for the computational search engine, including the Wolfram|Alpha API, Wolfram|Alpha iPhone App, and enterprise and custom versions.
• Discover Bing: Want to explore Bing and everything it has to offer? This is the place to do it.
• Search engines are a source of learning: An intriguing new study suggests that we mostly use search engines to confirm what we already know.
• Twitter Incorporates Retweeting (Beta Launch): Retweeting (basically passing along someone else's thoughts on Twitter) gets tweaked.

Did I miss something? If you've got a Web search news item you'd like to share, now is the time!

File hosting sites, such as Gigasize, Ziddu, File Dropper, MediaFire, Megaupload, HotFile, or Rapidshare, typically do not offer you the opportunity to see what other people have uploaded to their servers. However, there are a lot of search engines that offer a way around that, and one of them is FileLinkFind.

FileLinkFind gives you the ability to search all the file hosting services listed above (along with a few more). Plus, you can subscribe to a topic you'd like to keep track of; for instance, say you want to see updates to your favorite public domain eBook....well, you can simply subscribe to that topic via RSS. Note: Please be aware that FileLinkFind (and similar file hosting search engines and sites) offer adult content and advertising, and that it is considered illegal in most countries to download copyrighted files.

More file hosting search engines

• Rapidshare Search Engines: Rapidshare, one of the largest file hosting sites on the Web, does not offer a public search option to see what other people are uploading. However, you can get around that with Rapidshare search engines. Here are my picks for the top five Rapidshare search engines; they're all easy to use, offer advanced file hosting search capabilities, and best of all - they're free.