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GarlicToum

25 karma · joined December 10, 2020

Hacker News account for the Garlic Toum (https://garlictoum.com) The recipe search engine
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GarlicToum··on Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)
In the modern age, SEO is partially to blame for inaccurate recipe cook times. At some point Google realized that folks would click on more recipes with shorter times, as people would use that as a metric when cooking. So they would promote quicker recipes.

What ended up happening is some recipe developers would try and actually reduce the amount of time their recipe took, and others would just "shorten" prep (or even cook) time down, to try and get the most clicks. I know Kenji talks about it in one of his POV videos, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.

Since there isn't really a reliable way to know how long recipes would take for _you_ across different sites, it's almost not a useful metric, but it is what's been optimized for.

GarlicToum··on Search engines and SEO spam
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.

GarlicToum··on Search engines and SEO spam
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.

GarlicToum··on Search engines and SEO spam
Just submitted it, let's see what happens!
GarlicToum··on Search engines and SEO spam
Linked above, I didn't know you could just submit a random site to a DDG to be included in bangs
GarlicToum··on Search engines and SEO spam
https://garlictoum.com/
GarlicToum··on Search engines and SEO spam
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!

GarlicToum··on Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes
Always good to see another recipe search engine! Curious how they're doing it, but a lot of things that I search for don't seem to work. It also seems to use a lot of recipe aggregators in the few results I was able to find.

Disclosure: I'm the creator of https://garlictoum.com - another recipe search engine