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Recently I wrote a small search engine for NYC menus: https://c.bitlet.org/ff.html

The data is small enough that you can keep it all in memory. It was a nice toy and it let me play with a few data retrieval techniques I had heard talking about but never actually implemented.

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This is sweet haha. I want Mapo Tofu, nearby, ranked by price and distance. Next: what's the sentiment about that dish (from reviews). Or at least a restaurant rating.

Love how fast it is and the non distracting design. Bookmarked.

Interesting. Did you scrape the restaurants websites?

The data is scraped from restaurant menu aggregators. There are some online and they don't seem to even try to stop you from scraping.

If I had to guess I'd say that scraping restaurant websites would be a much bigger project than what I did, given that there isn't structure in how menus are presented, and most of them still have pdfs, or even worse, an image for their menu.

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