UPDATE: I updated the site for my curated food blog search engine so that it’s a little bit prettier and adding more sites to the index. If you have a suggestion for a site feel free to submit it at my Curated Food Blog Search.

Search my curated food blog list.

Google is great for most things, but finding genuine reviews of products, avoiding content farms and finding recipes is a bit of a failing. Most recipe searches turn up results for the biggest few sites, or worse random user submissions posted to them.

I was very happy to discover foodblogsearch.com, and it’s an invaluable resource for searching only food blogs. But I have lots of blogs I read and trust all happily stored in RSS subscriptions in Google Reader. Luckily Google makes it seriously easy to set up your own searches for a custom set of sites.

You can search my curated list of food blogs here, and I will endeavour to keep it up to date. If you want to make your own then I’ve included some instructions below.

Export your RSS subscriptions from the ‘Reader settings’ tab as an OPML file:

Use something like the fantastic Notepad++ to open the downloaded .xml file. You can see all your RSS subscriptions organised by category. Underneath each site title should be listed the address of the RSS feed (xmlUrl) and the address of the main site (htmlUrl).

Then you can use regular expressions, or hard manual labour to extract all the main site urls which you can happily copy and paste to add to a Google Custom Search, and there you have a nice custom search engine that only uses your finely hand picked websites. Alternatively you can search mine here.