Gone Raw vs. Yahoo! Recipes

It was inevitable, really. When we made the decision to work on a website for sharing raw food recipes, we naturally started by looking at what was out there. And one of the first places we looked was Yahoo!. Surely, a section of their vast web empire was dedicated to sharing recipes!

Turns out, there wasn’t, which kind of surprised me. But just one month later, just as we released Gone Raw, Yahoo! Food was also launched, which included their take on recipe sharing. And even though there’s a lot of recipe sites out there, we were sure that Yahoo’s deserved a good close look.

And they did a good job. The presentation is wonderful, they got some nice interactivity without resorting to Flash, and it’s easy to navigate and use. Now, there’s no way this is going to hurt Gone Raw, of course. You’d be hard-pressed to find a raw food recipe on Yahoo!. But there’s a lot of recipes on there. What’s the catch?

The catch is that they aren’t Yahoo’s recipes! Every recipe has a “provider,” a list that includes Allrecipes.com, Cook’s Illustrated, Martha Stewart, Epicurious.com, Reader’s Digest, and even Kraft Foods! That’s the catch!! You can’t add your own recipe. You can’t share a recipe with a friend. What Yahoo has given us is essentially a “portal,” a way of presenting recipes from a dozen other sites with their own ads.

Suffice it to say that we won’t be losing any sleep over this one. While we’re happy to see this site, and we’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from it, we think Yahoo kind of missed an opportunity. And anyway, we’re happy to focus on pleasing a small community of healthy individuals, not everyone looking for any recipe about anything.

Gone Raw is here to stay!

Raymond Brigleb

Creative Director, dreamer, partner, father, musician, photographer. Has been known to ride the rails. Pulls one heck of a shot.