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Show HN: Instant Search in NYC Restaurant Menus (c.bitlet.org)

9 points by casta ↗ HN
A few years ago I wrote a crawler to fetch all NYC menus. I wanted to prove that many specific dishes can't be found in NYC restaurants.

After more than two years that I had forgotten about the project I decided to clean it up, deal with the css, and put it online.

The number of interesting dishes that can be found is actually quite surprising.

The backend is written using nodejs without any framework (no db, just a bunch of in memory DS) and vanilla js/html/css for the frontend.

6 comments

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krishadi
You seem to really miss food from Sardinia and Emilia-Romagna.

This is pretty cool. I've been wanting to make something like this. Especially for my parents. Who's taste palate isn't used to many flavours. I find it hard to look for restaurants for them when they visit me.

casta
Food from Emilia Romagna or Sardinia is easy to find, that's why I linked it!

Food from Lunigiana is nowhere to be found in restaurants in NY.

wilmerags
Hey that's great! What tech stack did you use? -if you're open to share, if not no biggie-
casta
Happy to share! It's vanilla nodejs, no additional framework used (nothing like express.js or anything like that). The search stuff is just a bunch of custom in memory data structures, there is reverse index, plus a mapping of common misspellings, plus some prefix to likely words, plus some n-grams.

For the frontend is just plain js and html.

If you have a more specific question feel free to ask and I'm happy to answer.

e-clinton
This is awesome. Great idea. Plot these on a map. Maybe seamless affiliate links to make money?
shyn3
I need this for Toronto!