Indexing a Word Document?

Closest thing you can do is create a Table of Content, linking it with the recipes you have in the document. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...233231033.aspx

Google desktop search?

There's also just the plain old Window's "find" feature, which would probably suck as bad as Google desktop for your use case.

Your best bet--assuming a creation effort vs. search reward ratio--would be to organize the recipes according to a system that aligns with the way you want to search/browse the recipes. For instance, if you organize like most cookbooks, then you put the beef, chicken, seafood, veggie, etc. recipes together. You could then also create lists based on ingredients of interest. All this is stuff you would likely consider after a few minutes thinking about it. The dream, of course, is to have auto-organization of your information exactly in the way you might dream about it: or as they say in the biz "auto-magically".

One the one hand, you might get lucky with simple keyword searching. If you put each recipe in a separate document, then index them, you might find that keyword searches are good enough. For example, you do a search for "soufflé" and you find the 4 recipes you have for that.

It's unlikely that a generic search tool will give you the level of "intelligence" you might be desiring. I mean, recipes are fairly structured, at least in the manner that people usually search/browse them: by ingredient. Sometimes time is a factor (I want a meal in <45 minutes), or the like. But most often it is by ingredient. With few recipes, a keyword search might be enough, but with hundreds it may not be satisfactory. Then comes the question of whether search vs. constrained browse works better for your set of recipes. If you only have 50 recipes, it would likely be faster ripping through a table of contents than doing a search for "chicken parmesan".

Or, on a whole other tip, you might use a website with lots of recipes; one that you think has a good interface. You could probably add your own as well.

But, if you prefer to keep yours to yourself, and the number is less than...say 100, you might be best off putting them in a single Word document and building a table of contents organized by whatever makes sense to you: ingredient, time, cooking method, etc. You could always build multiple TOCs as well.

Maybe go outside of word and try some sort of journal/scrapbook program? I'm on mac so I don't know if there is an equivalent for this but it might help you get a few ideas: Circus Ponies Notebook 3.0