[HN Gopher] Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes ___________________________________________________________________ Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes Author : devanflores Score : 54 points Date : 2021-10-15 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (joinmunchy.com) (TXT) w3m dump (joinmunchy.com) | collegeburner wrote: | My problem with recipes is not that i cant find them, its that | everything has 32 million results and i dont know which ones are | good and which ones are crap. The "reviews" on sites never seem | to correlate with good vs bad recipes. If I've eaten something | before its kinda better but hard to find new dishes to make if I | dont also know the recipe is probably good. Anybody have advice | on good recipe sources? | symlinkk wrote: | https://based.cooking is my current favorite. | | If you have a NYTimes subscription, NYTimes Cooking is decent | although the recipes tend to get a little over complicated and | pretentious sometimes. | justinpombrio wrote: | I hear (and have tasted) that the NYT recipes are both | extensive and consistently good. | slow_donkey wrote: | I tried solving this with a search engine that accounted for | reviews with some manual curation, but I realized there's | actually an extremely limited set of 'good' recipe sites and | kept returning the same 10 sites with a long tail of average | sites. | | You could improve upon this by establishing site authority for | a topic (cuisine), but it still seemed pointless to me. | collegeburner wrote: | In the short term I'd appreciate some of those good recipe | sites as I dont know what is better or worse. Would you mind | sharing those 10 or so are good? | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | Most of the time - the recipes are pretty similar. | | It's usually just a difference in spices, oils (or other fats), | or emulsifiers. Or vegan / gluten free substitutes. | | Nothing beats knowing your tastes and learning how to actually | cook - then you can look at a recipe and know which things | you'd rather substitute with something else and how and when, | etc. | | But are there any good websites for this? | mongol wrote: | Yes I know what you mean. I think there should be a site that | realizes that there are many variants of well known dishes, and | they should be categorized as that. Very rarely is there an | original, true recipe that is the pristine source for the dish. | So when I search bearnaise sauce, I should not get a recipe, I | should get a general description, kind of like a Wikipedia | page. And then below that, all the different recipes, that can | be contributed like on a wiki. Each recipe should have a | feedback mechanism so the best ones gets upvoted. | jmuguy wrote: | Searching for your placeholder, "new york style pizza", returns | no results. | benbristow wrote: | Just searching for pizza doesn't even return pizza recipes. | Just pizza dough and Italian nachos (with a picture of a pizza | which isn't even anything like the finished product | apparently). | | Meanwhile I can go to Google or Bing and find actual Pizza | recipes with a box at the top dedicated to recipes. | lupire wrote: | Half-baked recipe apps aren't meant to be published. They are a | TODO List app that everyone does to learn tech stacks. | lapetitejort wrote: | Keep in mind that people want to make those "basic" ingredients | that are often overlooked. Bread, vinegar, sauerkraut, even | butter can be made from scratch at home. They're usually more | labor and time intensive, and don't follow the "heat thing up and | add to other thing" pattern, but the recipes are out there. | devwastaken wrote: | I need a recipe for the best cookies that don't harden. Every | website does the same ingredients and they're always rock hard | cookies. I want recipes from actual bakeries, chef's. | tarr11 wrote: | Why do I have to give you my email to see a recipe? | devanflores wrote: | The product is still in development phase right now. I am | collecting emails so I can reach out to people and get their | feedback on the product. I'm considering removing that | registration wall if it poses to be too much of a nuisance | smoldesu wrote: | Seems like a wonderful product, but I'm with the others: I | probably won't be using it if you need my personal | information first. It's a dark pattern (not that I'm accusing | you of being malicious) to force people into disclosing | anything to use your app, so I'd recommend adding a simple | feature like bookmarks that signed-in users can get as a | bonus. Otherwise, I see a lot of red flags as a developer | when someone is so upfront about needing my email. | | Regardless, keep up the good work! | devanflores wrote: | I just removed the registration wall, feel free to use the | product as you would like! | [deleted] | devanflores wrote: | I just removed the registration wall. Feel free to use the site | without signing up | abeppu wrote: | I think being a "search engine" but starting with a very small | database of recipes is not gonna help anyone. I tried searching | for recipes by ingredient: | | - "bok choy" 0 results | | - "bok choi" 0 results | | - "arugula" 0 results | | - "rocket" 1 result (but for oysters rockefeller, which doesn't | list rocket as an ingredient) | | - "eggplant" 1 result | | If the collection is that small, then maybe people should be able | to browse, rather than search? | | But even then, it doesn't seem actually useful. The site does let | you "search" without entering a query at all, which at least | shows me a page with more than one recipe. I filtered by | "vegetarian" as a dietary restriction, and saw stuff, at least. I | scrolled until I saw a "Pasta Salad" recipe which stated it takes | 835 minutes! Curious as to how that could possibly be, I tried to | click through ... only to arrive at a page for "Mini Southwestern | Corn Pup Muffins with Fiesta Dipping Sauce" covered by a "Welcome | Back" sign-in modal. I can see under the modal that one of the | ingredients is "hot dogs", so in addition to taking me to a | different result than I had clicked on, it also seems to have | taken me to something that didn't match my explicit filter | criteria. After dismissing the modal I see that the page for this | "result" isn't even the recipe; I have to click through to go to | allrecipes. I return to my "Munchy" tab and try to go back to the | list, and see that on load, it cleared my dietary restriction | filter. | rcoveson wrote: | It's even worse than I thought. I simply put in their suggested | ingredient to search on: rice. Of the four results I clicked | on, only one actually used rice. The other three used rice | flour or rice wine vinegar. Technically correct but totally | misses the spirit of a useful ingredient search. | mritchie712 wrote: | Agreed. | | Adding two common things also gives you 0 results (e.g. beef | and rice). | hunter2_ wrote: | > "rocket" 1 result (but for oysters rockefeller, which doesn't | list rocket as an ingredient) | | Seems like an inappropriate fuzz filter. Maybe swap it out for | one that just does proper stem matching. | | The _really_ weird part is that this occurs not only with the | regular title search, but also the ingredient search, and none | of this recipe 's ingredients have a fuzzy match whatsoever. | Wat?! | igorrek wrote: | I really like the idea. I have something similar, but it's only | my collection of excellent recipes at lindyrecipe.com | | Much more basic idea, basically a blog with curated recipes. | languagehacker wrote: | Hope you're at least scraping the recipe wiki or something. This | just doesn't seem like enough recipes. | nikolahristov wrote: | Somebody's gonna invest in that I guarantee you. | blueblob wrote: | The search does not recognize what are individual components nor | what should be in the title of a recipe. If I search for "white | bread," I get recipes that don't include white bread as an | ingredient and are not for white bread. I get mussel recipes that | include "white wine" and say to dip bread in the broth. It's | ultimately not a useful search. | hichamino wrote: | Paid subscription | GarlicToum wrote: | Always good to see another recipe search engine! Curious how | they're doing it, but a lot of things that I search for don't | seem to work. It also seems to use a lot of recipe aggregators in | the few results I was able to find. | | Disclosure: I'm the creator of https://garlictoum.com - another | recipe search engine | uneekname wrote: | No search results "by name" on Firefox for Android, but by | ingredients works great! | djbusby wrote: | Have to press search button twice, then wait for results to | load after the "no results" screen | devanflores wrote: | Thanks for telling me about this (and sorry for the error)! | It's working fine for me on ios but I'll have to look into | firefox causing some issues | beamatronic wrote: | Has anyone trained a neural net to categorize web pages | automatically? | hunter2_ wrote: | While not strictly incorrect, for those of us who do find it | weird to see, can you change "less" to "fewer"? | | > Oh no! Your search returned no results. Try entering less | ingredients. | | Anyway, very cool! | droptablemain wrote: | Cool idea, but you need more data. A search for ingredient "rice" | returns only 9 recipes. | | Maybe scrape schema json-ld recipe data to help build your | dataset? | [deleted] | ziggus wrote: | Why would I use this when Google returns fantastic recipe options | at the top of any recipe-related search results page, including | pictures, ratings, and an ingredients summary? | dbcurtis wrote: | Because all the current recipe sites are cesspools of adverts, | unnecessary and distracting write-ups, and obfuscated | printability? They are poster children for much of what makes | the current web a miserable chore to use. | mattjenner wrote: | The database is far too small, go and really populate it & come | back! this is an awesome idea, when you are ready. | | I was confused though, there appears to be no long story | involving a grandmother and a rat named terry who used to nibble | at the candles in your cabin. ETC! ;-) | [deleted] | dmitriid wrote: | Any recipe should have links to wikipedia articles or to a | descriptions of every ingredient. | | So many times it's something like "jus use crunchy arugula flour | with prime undercut ribsteaks, and season with spring twigs of | muffinballs" | | The world is global. And 99% of the world has no idea what it is | you use in that recipe. | thenayr wrote: | Put top recipes on the home page, actually curate some data (at | least 4 searches just show no results), a million other small | things. Honestly just looks like a "my first open-source" recipe | app repo on github. | | Way too early to show off, best of luck. Recipe websites are | notoriously bad and there is obvious room for improvement. | mikeg8 wrote: | No results for "lamb". This should have been way more complete | before sharing here. | ABraidotti wrote: | searching for lamb results in: Oh no! Your search returned no | results. Try entering a less specific name. | | Ungulate seemed promising, but similarly returned nothing. | Maybe a generic name next? | throwanem wrote: | I tried Eukaryota, but also didn't get anything. One assumes | their implementation of full taxonomic search is still on the | roadmap somewhere... | xwdv wrote: | The great thing about this is that I don't have to read (skip) a | fucking preamble before each recipe about why this dish reminds | the author of that time they spent a summer backpacking through | Europe with their boyfriend. Keep it up. | davestephens wrote: | It must be hard work to push that "jump to recipe" button that | features on pretty much every food blog on the planet. | pleb_nz wrote: | No results for kumara in either search. | | Good luck, be good to see something like this working. | | Be good to see recipes and ingredients from many cultures and not | be western heavy. | ProfAesop wrote: | I would appreciate a down to earth recipe database, with limited | advertising, and limited SEO-pre-recipe content. | | Too bad this wasn't it. | jnsie wrote: | This is exactly what I need....but i searched by ingredients with | 'chicken breast' and 'jalapeno' and it returned 0 results. Then i | searched 'chicken' and 'jalapeno' and it returned 1 result. Seems | undercooked (pun very much intended) | devanflores wrote: | Hey jnsie, sorry for the poor experience. I'm still working on | the product and it definitely is in development mode. Although | this sounds unintended, this is currently how the recipe search | algorithm works. Because the recipe does not include the | ingredient "chicken breast", no results come up. However, | multiple recipes include the ingredient "chicken", which lead | to you getting a result. I'm working on developing some kind of | smart detection algorithm that will ensure you're getting more | results and a more accurate result page. | inertiatic wrote: | You are making a recipe search app without actually paying | attention to the information retrieval part of it, which is | arguably the most important thing! | | Using any sort of backend that tokenizes (and why not, | lowercases and stems) and does the searching for you is what | you want as a first step. ES, or any of the newer fast search | engines that aren't that concerned about relevance would be | good first steps, then depending on how much you could grow, | you're going to have quite tricky but enjoyable journey to | optimizing for relevance! | arthurcolle wrote: | just use elasticsearch | marginalia_nu wrote: | Looks pretty promising. There seems to be quite a lot of | frustration with finding recipes, so I think there is a market | for something like this. | | If you are looking for ways to improve the relevance of the | search results, try to prioritize results that contain the exact | search terms in the title, then some of the terms in the title, | and then in the description, and then in the ingredients. | | It's pretty tricky to get right, but I don't think you are that | far off. | | I'd also get rid of the email fishing popovers, it's very off- | putting. | chrismatei wrote: | Just to add my 2 cents. This is great ideea and for sure I can | see the use of it. But the email part, that is not somehting I | would do for a recipe. Next, the you can add planner and you will | have any nutritionist on this site giving you the emails. and | they can fine tune the data you have. Ofc "suggest or improve | recipe" is a very good ideea :) best of luck. | what_is_orcas wrote: | No results for "falafel". | | I really want this to work, I love the filter options that I see | (assuming they work) and I'd love to use something like this | instead of Google/Bing (where the top-recommendations are all ads | or super bloggy). | devanflores wrote: | Hey! That's the goal. I will admit the database is small | because I'm adding them manually but I'm working on finding a | way to scrape recipes automatically. In the meantime, the | tradeoff for the better user experience is less recipes | what_is_orcas wrote: | Is there a way to help out with that? I just take screenshots | of recipes on my phone because I hate the modern internet. If | I could enter in a url and you could scrape the recipe off of | that page, that'd be great (for others). | | Out of curiosity, is this a hobby-project or something you're | going to try to make money off of? | devanflores wrote: | Yeah, thanks for the idea! I'm planning on allowing manual | submission of recipes. I ultimately want Munchy to become a | company. I have a lot of other innovations planned for the | consumer home kitchen space and would like to see it | through! Making this website a successful business is the | first step for me to achieve that goal If you ever want to | share feedback or contribute, my email is on my profile so | you are free to reach out. | dunham wrote: | A lot of web sites have a chunk of json-ld in a script tag, | which greatly eases recipe scraping. (I think they mostly do | this for google search.) | Riverheart wrote: | I've taken to searching food manufacturer and grocery store | websites for recipes. Since they're selling you the ingredients | there are no ads, although recipes are more limited in scope. | | For instance https://mahatmarice.com/recipes/ | | If you want falafel I'd find a falafel brand's website. | i_am_proteus wrote: | King Arthur's recipe collection is a treasure trove: | https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes | devanflores wrote: | Hi all, after hearing all the feedback, I decided to remove the | registration wall behind the website. Feel free to use the | website as desired. If anyone is interested in contributing their | feedback to the product and testing new features, please feel | free to register as I will be reaching out to newly registered | users | ignoramous wrote: | Fun fact, Shay Bannon created Compass (precursor to Elastic.co) | for a recipe search engine: https://archive.is/dlrIF | | Big shoes to fill (: | lambic wrote: | I used to use a recipe site that had a really good search engine | but they got rid of it for unknown reasons. I hope this one stays | around. | | One thing that old one had was the ability to exclude ingredients | as well as include which came in handy when I was cooking for | jewish friends. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-15 23:00 UTC)