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Summer has just begun and if you’re watching what you eat in hopes of looking good in your speedo, Google is making things easier on you. Starting today, Google has announced that they’ve been hard at work indexing more than 1,000 food items for Google Search. Searching your favorite foods — say, “burrito” will provide you with extensive nutrition information.
The info is displayed in Google’s trademark card-style and shows you everything from calories, to carbs, sugar, or whatever else you’re trying to keep a close eye on with your diet. Google has even incorporated these food items into their Knowledge Graph. This means food items can be searched using natural language with Google pulling up relevant data for “zucchini” even if you searched for “summer squash.” Clever.
While a thousand fruits, vegetables, and small meals are definitely a great start, Google plans to add even more food items and features in the future. Don’t fret if the nutrition cards aren’t showing up in your Google Search app just yet. The feature launches today (in English) and will continue rolling out to US users over the next 10 days. More languages also coming soon.
This is gonna be really helpful for Type 1 Diabetics like myself. I wonder if Google would consider creating a nutrition app that lets you download food information offline.
Google doesn’t seem to like people to be offline – the “Google Experience” is optimized for being online.
Caching data for offline use is actually a little tricky, since there’s too much to download it all, and data providers don’t want you to have stale data.
I’m building an upcoming nutrition app right now and working on the online/offline issue. It’s not for diabetes, but that might be a good future direction.
“Google doesn’t seem to like people to be offline – the “Google Experience” is optimized for being online.”
It isn’t as much they want you to be online, it is just hard to offer a full experience offline when using web technology, but at least they are improving even thought it is quite slow.
It’s a shame that they seem to be SO geared to online, and there seems to be no room for offline. If I go abroad, I don’t necessarily want to buy a sim card there, and I’m certainly not paying for roaming data. And then, in the UK atleast, if you decide you want to go outside of your home town to the countryside then you’re either getting very slow GPRS or nothing at all. It’s only useful if it’s always there. I look forward to seeing your app ;) I currently use an app, available on Google Play, called “Carbs & Cals” which is great but the UI is really outdated and it’s lacking some common food. The search is also bad. If you could make a similar app to that, as long as it contains carb info, then I’m all for trying it and possibly paying if it’s good :) .
“How many Calories does a whopper with cheese have?” (Phone crashes, then force reboots) lol
Wow I think Burger King would be pissed about that lol
How about some college football cards
They’ll get it. They added the less-popular college basketball mid-season. They won’t ignore FB
Try “Nutrition Facts” free app. Lots of USDA info including fast food category. Not necessary to be online to use.