Google sorts out recipes in food related searches.

Although Google is careful to distinguish between paid and regular search results, and may mix shopping, video, blog and news search results into your web search results, they will not normally sort your results into categories.

Doing a search for the correct spelling of cafe con leche, however, we found an example of Google separating one type of search results from the other with two horizontal lines and a small headlines saying “See results for: cafe on leche recipe.

What happens here is that Google (correctly) identifies this search as food related and gives you three results from the alternative search query “cafe con leche recipe”. You can click on the alternative query to get more results of the same kind.

Google will not give you recipes lists for all food related queries, but we have been able to reproduce the phenomenon (for “omelette”, for instance).

We haven’t seen this happen before, but we may have missed it. In any case, we like it.

We can immediately see other searches that can benefit from such categorization of search results. When searching for a particular hotel, for instance, we would very much like Google to label the hotel home page clearly. Right now we have to wade through a large number of travel search sites to get to the right site.

Note that Google may in some instances also help you narrow down your search by listing alternative search queries at the bottom of the search result page. A search for “san fransico” will, for example, bring up related searches like “san francisco giants”, “san francisco earthquake”, “san francisco attractions”, “golden gate bridge” and more.