HN: Please review my site, cooking video search engine Cookblast | Hacker News Reader

HN: Please review my site, cooking video search engine Cookblast

cookblast.com

11 pointsdood16 comments

Cool idea. One little thing I just noticed: when I click on an autocomplete term in the search field, it doesn't initiate the search. I have to hit the search button. Just a small user experience thing.

One slightly bigger thing: While it's a cool idea, it leaves me wondering why I should use this instead of googling "[specific dish/recipe] videos." Google gives me a lot more videos than this site does right now.

But if you can crack that and offer something new in the area of cooking instruction videos, you'll definitely have something, since cooking videos are really popular.

Thanks, I'll sort out the autocomplete.

The idea is that it provides a couple of things Google doesn't.

1. All results in one place, watch videos from across the web in one interface

2. Exclusivity of results - you know its all cooking and all good quality, don't have to weed through some of the random stuff from Google.

3. Ability to navigate, surf and refine. Helps you to explore dishes, ingredients, cuisines - for example to quickly look through popular Thai dishes and ingredients. This is something I hope will keep the cooks coming back for more, and will be working on improving in the coming months. Also realize I need to improve how I communicate this, both in conversation and to users!

Incorporating some community type features (votes, comments etc) may also help differentiate from Google and keep foodies coming back.

Why is it when I search for "gordon ramsay" I keep getting 500 Errors but "beef" produces fine results?

Quick feedback:

+ I see no thumbnails, yet this is a video search engine. Plus, as a person looking for food recipes, I want to see pictures. People are very visual when looking for food especially.

+ I notice some encoding errors on some searches, "black pepper" first result.

+ Could use some more colour/flare?

Otherwise, a great index to start. Look forward to seeing improvements

Thanks for the feedback.

The Gordon Ramsay error is due to a last minute change (doh). In the meantime searching for 'ramsay' should give you the right results [http://cookblast.com/cooking/ramsay]. Edit: fixed.

Thumbnails are in the works, would have liked them to be ready for launch but thought it better to get the site out there.

That encoding error is actually from the original link itself, but I should try to clean those up.

Should probably hire a pro to do the design. Thats the best I can do without tearing my hair out!

Awesome! I was curious how gordon ramsay search would turn up because he has plenty of videos from his tv shows yelling at people, but I love his recipes. Your results only contained his recipes, very nice.

Looks good so far. Here are my quick first impressions:

* Have your logo/search box above the explanation.

* I don't like the scrolling box the results come in.

* The results are kind of bland...in other words WHY should I click on the first link that comes up? Is it the best keyword match? Best video?

I was going to do some more testing but it looks like it died/dying. One thing I did notice - is there a limit on the text box?

Thanks, someone hitting it pretty hard but I think it should all be cool now.

I'm still debating the scrolling box. The idea is to have all the results in one place, but I'm considering alternatives. May A/B test this some point soon.

Results are by standard search approach; work well in some cases and less well in others. I'll be trying to improve the ordering in the near future. Also the ability to filter by facets means it isn't all about the results - the navigation should work with the results.

Got it.

I would continue to debate it the box. That was just one persons opinion. More specifically - I thought it made it look a bit like spam, and here - your side navigation runs below the text box making me scroll two places to see the entire site.

As for deciding on which video to watch - maybe a simple rating system:

* ($votes) Result Title

???

Anyway - good start!

I like how you pull the video straight into the site rather than sending me off to one of those terrible recipe sites. But you're going to need to scrape the recipe itself and display it under the video so that I can actually, you know, cook stuff.

Good point. I'm not doing this because it seems legally dodgy. What I can do is provide a direct link to the text recipe, where available.

Recipes are not subject to copyright unless it "is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions" (e.g. you are clear on a conventional recipe, but not copying something like the detailed explanation of why/how various recipe choices were made such as you would see in cooks illustrated.)

Nah, ignore the dodge and do it anyway. It's the internet. You're not stealing, you're "citing". Just be sure to link to the original and most of these recipe sites will think you're doing them a favor.

I was very confused by the results scroll box. When I searched for beef, for about 30 seconds I thought there were only 7 results.

Seems daft to have the navigation go the full length of my screen but the results stops half way up.

The first thing I searched on, http://cookblast.com/cooking/banana_bread throws a server error.

Thanks, fixed.

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