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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

I have cookbooks, both physical and in digital formats, but it's usually faster to do a web search, especially when I mostly need cooking time and temperature. Perhaps this will motivate me to finally get around the setting up a local search function for my electronic cookbook collection as the web is going to be less and less trustworthy.

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For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the language of the country the dishes are from and use CC auto-translate.

It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to produce than text) in a search for quality.

Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable end state of democratization of creation + centralization of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.

Why is it ironic? I think it's more of a "humans are unable to learn from history moment". Romans called it "the mob" because of the common problems that occurred when large groups of undirected people got together and chaos broke loose. Of course the opposite where the authoritarian leader ruled everything also lead to Rome burning.

There is a happier middleground where multiple gates exist to filter out the bullshit, but no said gatekeeper controls the entire market leading to monopoly behavior.

Video is just a better format than text for many recipes, at least for novice cooks. The results often depend on technique as much as ingredients, and it's hard to convey technique through text.

Well-edited video. Cannot state how infuriating it is when the exact piece I'm stuck on is jumped over with a time cut.

Incidentally, this is why I click on the dirtiest garage clip for car how-to's: it's usually just the raw start-to-end process.

Firefox makes it pretty easy to add a custom search engine.

That one could point to your local server instance.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch#auto...

Have a look at

https://www.eatyourbooks.com/

not sure if they do ebooks.

It's a shame, this seems like a really great idea, but I just tried to use it and for a recipe from a book I own it comes up with:

> We’ve helped you locate this recipe but for the full instructions you need to go to its original source.

Which I guess makes sense, how can they verify I own the cookbook, but still very disappointing.

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