So Google today just launched a new, yes I know this is redundant, project/tool/time waster for all of us to play with. Google Co-op is a chance for you to create a search tool that searches a defined group of sites, a particular subject or both. Basically it allows me to waste 30mins of my time going through the bookmarks of all of my favorite Iberian wine and food sites and cataloging them so that you can search their content for information.

• Ever need a good recipe fast for Paella?
• Want to know what Tempranillo is?
• How about finding a wine from an obscure Portuguese producer?

Up until now you had Google and its 2,000,000,000 indexed pages to go through. Speed wasn’t a problem but crappy search results from time to time proved to be bothersome. Especially when, hypothetically, someone who builds cars in their garage for fun chooses to name one “La Rioja” for some weird reason and then makes a web page all about it! Anyways this “tailored” search from Google is supposed to help fix that. We’ll see what happens. Above is the search box that you can use on Catavino, and here is a link to the homepage of the Spanish and Portuguese Wine and Food Search Engine. I’ll add one to the sidebar too. The best part of all of this in my opinion is the ability to have you help edit this list. If you know of a great site with info on Iberian wine, please join up and help to make this search engine even better!

Till soon,
Ryan Opaz