Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes
joinmunchy.com
joinmunchy.com
- "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.
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.
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?!
Adding two common things also gives you 0 results (e.g. beef and rice).
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?
You could improve upon this by establishing site authority for a topic (cuisine), but it still seemed pointless to me.
They’re also written well and are pretty easy to follow without long preambles or anything.
If you have a NYTimes subscription, NYTimes Cooking is decent although the recipes tend to get a little over complicated and pretentious sometimes.
No ads, no seo, no life story.
Disclosure: I'm the creator of https://garlictoum.com - another recipe search engine
Meanwhile I can go to Google or Bing and find actual Pizza recipes with a box at the top dedicated to recipes.
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! ;-)
Big shoes to fill (:
> Oh no! Your search returned no results. Try entering less ingredients.
Anyway, very cool!
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!
Regardless, keep up the good work!
Too bad this wasn't it.
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.
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.
Ungulate seemed promising, but similarly returned nothing. Maybe a generic name next?
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).
For instance https://mahatmarice.com/recipes/
If you want falafel I'd find a falafel brand's website.
Out of curiosity, is this a hobby-project or something you're going to try to make money off of?
I don't think it's important to find a recipe that uses all of the ingredients. I think it might be better to find recipes that uses fewest additional ones.
Much more basic idea, basically a blog with curated recipes.
Maybe scrape schema json-ld recipe data to help build your dataset?
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.
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.