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Comment by GarlicToum | Hacker News Reader

I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search.

So from an individual developer perspective, it's very hard to get people to change their habits. And Google/duck/Bing is the one stop shop.

It's still out there, but I haven't worked on it much lately. I always think that if I had some good advertisers, a better UI, and a salary coming in, maybe it could take over some of Google's usage!

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> I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search.

Link please

https://garlictoum.com/

Just an idea but what about making it easier for folks to remember to use you search somehow‽

I like and use Duck Duck Go‘s !bangs [1] all the time, maybe try to add your site with a rememberable name.. may I suggest !garlic ?

[1] - https://duckduckgo.com/bang [2] - https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

Just submitted it, let's see what happens!

Always nice to see other sites using Svelte!

Have bookmarked. I shall try to remember to use it.

This is really cool! Bookmarked!

One piece of feedback: It seems to somewhat liberally fuzz the term, doesn't tell me about it and not toggle it in the UI. I searched for "Natto" and got some great results at the top (Spicy Kimchi Natto!). However, a few results down the recipes start including "Nattu" which seems to be a Indian chicken dish and then quickly have nothing to do with the term at all and give me stuff like Tafelspitz.

Yeah, that's the typo detection in search. The key thing is that "Natto" is prioritized, so that part is working correctly!

Tweaking search can be a whole full time thing. I'll write it down and maybe look into if I can tweak the search so if there are exact matches to not show alternatives.

This is great. I've been juicing a lot lately and every site you go to is full of adds and useless content and you have to click `Jump To Recipe`.

1 thing that would be helpful is to add in the ingredient amounts.

Yeah, that was part of the long term monetization plan. Paid for user accounts ($3ish/month) that allow people to clip recipes, view previews, discuss, modify, and share.

Never quite got around to it unfortunately, as I wanted more users before new features.

(1) What is it?

(2) Do you have a bang on DuckDuckGo? I'm pretty aggressive with bangs, and I suspect a lot of DDG users end up being aggressive with them as well.

Linked above, I didn't know you could just submit a random site to a DDG to be included in bangs

I think the name may be part of the problem there. Most things people want recipes for probably don't contain or go with garlic. E.g. if I wanted to make a cake, garlic is one of the last things I'd think of.

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