[HN Gopher] Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes
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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.
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