A clever idea on the part of Yahoo. In addition to searching for restaurants, you can search for specific items in restaurants when you’re doing a Yahoo search. So if you don’t want just seafood but grilled Tilapia, you have a search option. I like the idea but I got confused a couple of times.

Say I want tiramisu in New York. I would go to Yahoo’s main search engine and just search for tiramisu New York. Yahoo would figure out that I’m looking for food and the result would look like this:

Yahoo gives you a map and a list of restaurants. I picked out the Ninja restaurant right away, went to the Web site, and looked at its menu. Though its dessert listing included the intriguing “Ninja Star,” I could not in fact find a listing for tiramisu. It’s possible that Ninja had it once and no longer has it, I suppose.

I did find tiramisu on the menu at Landmarc, Quintessence, and Lil’ Frankie’s Pizza (I went through the results and picked three to check that looked interesting.) The lesson is doublecheck the menu before you adjust your taste buds and head out.

Be careful how specific you get, too. Halibut in New York got me 169 results, while grilled halibut got me 150, but with a lot of obvious wrong matches… broiled halibut as the menu item with the word grilled somewhere near by, problems like that. So be as specific as you can. I was pleased to see that there were plenty of results even in non-metro areas — Savannah Georgia isn’t nearly as large as New York, but I still found 82 results on a search for oysters.