DuckDuckGo adds zero-click recipe search with the Punchfork Recipe API

http://blog.punchfork.com/2011/07/05/announcing-the-punchfork-recipe-api-and-a-search-partnership-with-duckduckgo/

by jeffmiller • 15 years ago

101 30 15 years ago

blog.punchfork.com

icey2• 15 years ago

Jeff doesn't have it in his HN bio, but Punchfork is his (awesome) startup

asymmetric3• 15 years ago

who's jeff by the way?

jeffmiller3• 15 years ago

po• 15 years ago

My favorite part of punchfork (besides Jeff) are the custom url shorteners. Check out the customize dropdown on the side of a recipe page: http://punchfork.com/recipe/Bramble-Chow

Nice little touch.

hiroprot• 15 years ago

Great API docs...some of the big boys should take note!

cl8ton• 15 years ago

I wish I had your UI skills Jeff!... Been using PF for a while now and it's great.

jordank• 15 years ago

A great tool for recipe ideas is to enter two ingredients and see what comes up: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickpea+potato

rgrieselhuber• 15 years ago

I also like how the API directs you to the source of the recipe.

Click on one of the recipes in the Punchfork results:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mojito+recipe

Jeff is doing an amazing job with Punchfork and this is a great addition.

dlikhten• 15 years ago

Gabriel, if you are reading this, I am waiting on the duckduckgo stickers with a fork stuck in the bill in response to this. Gota put it on my hot rod...err... dinky netbook.

epi0Bauqu4• 15 years ago

We sent out a batch yesterday and do it about once a month. If you asked before a month ago then they should have arrived already! If not, they may have gotten returned (we get returns). You could send the address again.

MrJagil• 15 years ago

Cool update, Gabriel. Are you still working solo on DDG?

epi0Bauqu4• 15 years ago

No: https://twitter.com/#!/duckduckgo/team/members. I'm still the only one full-time, but I think those days are dated. There is ample opportunity to get involved if anyone is interested, including plenty of stuff that can be open sourced.

Newky• 15 years ago

Sorry unrelated, but just realized DuckDuckGo has hash bang syntax for hackernews!

!hackernews which leads to a hnsearch.com search results!

I've been using it as my default search engine for about 2/3 weeks now and its been unnoticeable (in a good way)

epi0Bauqu4• 15 years ago

FYI: !hn or !yc is shorter (take your pick).

asymmetric3• 15 years ago

I am amazed that so few people have ever heard of YubNub[1]. It's a service that provides this kind of feature (`g foo' to google, `gim bar' for google images, `am baz' for amazon, etc.), plus some advanced tricks (multiple parameters, default values, command combination).

Anybody can create commands.

It's a hidden gem, and I love it.

[1] http://yubnub.org

planb• 15 years ago

I just thought: DuckDuckGo should get a shorter domain name because it takes to long to type it. It thought of duck.com so I checked what's there, and to my surprise it redirected to... google! Looks like someone there also thought of this.

Or has "duck" another (search related) meaning in english that I'm not aware of?

epi0Bauqu4• 15 years ago

We have http://ddg.gg/

As for duck.com, see https://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google

defen• 15 years ago

Wow. I wonder how they justify that as a non-evil action?

asymmetric3• 15 years ago

there's http://dukgo.com

ry0ohki• 15 years ago

Ironically, the search has a little bug. There's no where to do a two word phrase search, so if i do 'fried chicken' or "fried chicken" I get chicken fried steak as the number one result. Seems like the refinements show that it also searched for the word individually.

jeffmiller3• 15 years ago

"fried chicken" as a single term wasn't in my db, but I'll add it shortly. Thanks for letting me know.

DanielBMarkham2• 15 years ago

My wife and I have a small site that serves up hamburger casserole recipes ( http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com/ )

She was getting over 15K visits per month -- the site made almost nothing, but we enjoyed creating it together, watching the numbers and responding to emails. And the numbers kept climbing -- at least until a couple of weeks ago.

I noticed the traffic numbers starting to drop. I was wondering why. I thought about digging into it but put it off. Perhaps this new feature at DDG did it? If so, fine with me. They doing a much more awesome job than we did.

The only reason I mention it is because this is the type of question that if you knew enough, you could find the answers in SEO-land. But for a little mom-and-pop site, lots of times you don't have that luxury. You're hot for a few months then suddenly it all dies off and you never know why. You could be adding the best content you can and still all the visitors disappear. No skin off of my back in this particular case, but this has to be frustrating for lots of folks -- especially if your site is a startup instead of something silly like recipes.

Way cool UI! I think we'll add it -- looks like it might be a nice fit.

Joakal• 15 years ago

Sounds like no analytics if you're relying on hits purely. It might not be too late to check how users find the website. Look at trends.google.com, alexa.com, etc for related searches. Might also be a good idea to start webmaster accounts on search engines (Google and Bing at least I know of).

The website name is also quite a handful to remember ;)

DanielBMarkham2• 15 years ago

When we put it together, if you searched for "hamburger casserole recipes" all you got were sites that tried to trick you into signing up for recurring cell phone charges or stuff like that. She thought it would be nice to make a plain site that helped folks (our idea of "plain" was not so good back then!) We figured using our target phrase as the domain name would at least tell people what we were about.

We make maybe 20 bucks a month from the site, and domain renewal is something like 140/year for all the major TLDs, so it's not a high priority right now. The only reason I shared this to try to point out how easy it is to lose traffic and not know why.

If I wanted to chase it, I'd go to SEOMoz and check out the backlinks and competition -- did anything change over the past month? Are other sites getting a bunch of links for some reason?

Thanks for the great tips! We have a Webmaster account on Google. Didn't know there were options also on Bing. Looking at Google Analytics today, we're still at 13K visitors for the previous month, which is about a 20% decline. It's all still search engine traffic, mostly from Google and mostly for "tater tot casserole" Go figure. Is tater tot casserole so popular? Why? These kinds of questions drive you crazy, because many times when you make a site for your startup or topic -- especially if it has a lot of pages, you get all this data from web analytics and it's a bitch trying to make some kind of meaning out of it.

Folks are still spending on average more than a minute on the site, which means they are taking time to read the recipes and get some value. That's all that counts for us.

BTW, if any of you startup guys want to go into recipes, good luck. She has had this site, with lots of traffic, for a couple of years now, and hell if we can figure out how to monetize it. We did books, kitchenware, magazines, AdSense -- finally writing our own ebook. Right now we're thinking about coupons or some other giveaway product, but I don't have my hopes up. Recipes, at least to me, looks like an income-free zone. One of the reasons we did the ebook was to provide a totally ad-free place to keep track of recipes. We're operating under the principle that people who are cooking hamburger casseroles probably aren't needing anything else at all, at least at the moment they're online.

Still, we did it to make something people want that can scale, so no matter how it turns out, we helped people (as evidenced by our emails and traffic stats) and we can learn something from it.

blehn• 15 years ago

I don't really see the relevance of your comment, perhaps because it's mostly incoherent nonsense, but I wonder if you posted mainly to have a high-traffic inbound link to yet another one of your SEO spam blogs.

I'm not sure exactly what your business is (a one-man Demand Media?), but it's getting old fast.

icey2• 15 years ago

Unless you got a huge amount of your traffic from DDG, I would imagine the recent update to Google's search algorithm (Panda 2.2) had more to do with the dropoff in your traffic than Punchfork did.

jason_tko• 15 years ago

Congrats Jeff, this looks awesome.

fourstar• 15 years ago

How do you get around the legality of showing other websites' recipes on yours?

jeffmiller3• 15 years ago

I don't show the other websites' full recipes on Punchfork. Only the ingredients.

DuckDuckGo adds zero-click recipe search with the Punchfork Recipe API

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