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)
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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?
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.
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.
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! ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> "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?!
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.
1. Instead of hosting the images yourself, you're linking directly to Meredith Corp's image servers. They probably won't appreciate that; if you scaled this out enough they'd likely ban your referrer (and that's if copyright doesn't turn out to be a bigger issue first).
2. 199 recipes is too few. I'd say you don't really have anything to demo, or a good dataset to experiment with on your side, until you have tens of thousands.
3. Your search-by-ingredient and search-by-name both do the same thing; they just make a words list and set it as the query for MeiliSearch. Meaning it just fuzzy matches against all the attributes of every document in the database. That's not any more helpful than a generic search engine. I expect a purpose-specific search engine to take advantage of its domain knowledge; e.g. it should:
i. Know ingredient synonyms
ii. Recognize when an ingredient a trivial product of another ingredient (e.g. egg whites are trivial from eggs, but rice vinegar is not trivial from rice).
iii. Other than those two cases, ingredients matches should not be fuzzy. It's no good if baking power matches when all I have is baking soda, or if buttermilk matches when I have butter.
4. The documents in your database are not well curated (which will make #3 more difficult). You're actually leaning pretty heavily on fuzzy matching. For example, in the DB "vegetarian" is misspelled as "vegatarian". And many ingredients have leading whitespace, including newline characters. Keep your DB clean and you'll be able to take advantage of fuzzy matching when appropriate but still retain the ability to do exact matching.
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.
I’m no chef, but I live in a dry climate, and for soft cookies I get good results by storing them in sealed containers with a slice of bread immediately after cooling. The moisture in the bread makes it like a humidor for your cookies so they stay soft longer :)
73 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadUsing 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!
Regardless, keep up the good work!
Meanwhile I can go to Google or Bing and find actual Pizza recipes with a box at the top dedicated to recipes.
Big shoes to fill (:
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).
Out of curiosity, is this a hobby-project or something you're going to try to make money off of?
For instance https://mahatmarice.com/recipes/
If you want falafel I'd find a falafel brand's website.
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! ;-)
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.
Way too early to show off, best of luck. Recipe websites are notoriously bad and there is obvious room for improvement.
Much more basic idea, basically a blog with curated recipes.
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.
Ungulate seemed promising, but similarly returned nothing. Maybe a generic name next?
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.
- "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.
Adding two common things also gives you 0 results (e.g. beef and rice).
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?!
1. Instead of hosting the images yourself, you're linking directly to Meredith Corp's image servers. They probably won't appreciate that; if you scaled this out enough they'd likely ban your referrer (and that's if copyright doesn't turn out to be a bigger issue first).
2. 199 recipes is too few. I'd say you don't really have anything to demo, or a good dataset to experiment with on your side, until you have tens of thousands.
3. Your search-by-ingredient and search-by-name both do the same thing; they just make a words list and set it as the query for MeiliSearch. Meaning it just fuzzy matches against all the attributes of every document in the database. That's not any more helpful than a generic search engine. I expect a purpose-specific search engine to take advantage of its domain knowledge; e.g. it should:
i. Know ingredient synonyms
ii. Recognize when an ingredient a trivial product of another ingredient (e.g. egg whites are trivial from eggs, but rice vinegar is not trivial from rice).
iii. Other than those two cases, ingredients matches should not be fuzzy. It's no good if baking power matches when all I have is baking soda, or if buttermilk matches when I have butter.
4. The documents in your database are not well curated (which will make #3 more difficult). You're actually leaning pretty heavily on fuzzy matching. For example, in the DB "vegetarian" is misspelled as "vegatarian". And many ingredients have leading whitespace, including newline characters. Keep your DB clean and you'll be able to take advantage of fuzzy matching when appropriate but still retain the ability to do exact matching.
Too bad this wasn't it.