Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes

https://joinmunchy.com/

by devanflores • 5 years ago

79 67 5 years ago

joinmunchy.com

uneekname• 5 years ago

No search results "by name" on Firefox for Android, but by ingredients works great!

djbusby• 5 years ago

Have to press search button twice, then wait for results to load after the "no results" screen

devanflores8• 5 years ago

Thanks for telling me about this (and sorry for the error)! It's working fine for me on ios but I'll have to look into firefox causing some issues

jnsie• 5 years ago

This is exactly what I need....but i searched by ingredients with 'chicken breast' and 'jalapeno' and it returned 0 results. Then i searched 'chicken' and 'jalapeno' and it returned 1 result. Seems undercooked (pun very much intended)

devanflores8• 5 years ago

Hey jnsie, sorry for the poor experience. I'm still working on the product and it definitely is in development mode. Although this sounds unintended, this is currently how the recipe search algorithm works. Because the recipe does not include the ingredient "chicken breast", no results come up. However, multiple recipes include the ingredient "chicken", which lead to you getting a result. I'm working on developing some kind of smart detection algorithm that will ensure you're getting more results and a more accurate result page.

arthurcolle• 5 years ago

just use elasticsearch

inertiatic• 5 years ago

You are making a recipe search app without actually paying attention to the information retrieval part of it, which is arguably the most important thing!

Using any sort of backend that tokenizes (and why not, lowercases and stems) and does the searching for you is what you want as a first step. ES, or any of the newer fast search engines that aren't that concerned about relevance would be good first steps, then depending on how much you could grow, you're going to have quite tricky but enjoyable journey to optimizing for relevance!

tarr11• 5 years ago

Why do I have to give you my email to see a recipe?

devanflores8• 5 years ago

The product is still in development phase right now. I am collecting emails so I can reach out to people and get their feedback on the product. I'm considering removing that registration wall if it poses to be too much of a nuisance

smoldesu• 5 years ago

Seems like a wonderful product, but I'm with the others: I probably won't be using it if you need my personal information first. It's a dark pattern (not that I'm accusing you of being malicious) to force people into disclosing anything to use your app, so I'd recommend adding a simple feature like bookmarks that signed-in users can get as a bonus. Otherwise, I see a lot of red flags as a developer when someone is so upfront about needing my email.

Regardless, keep up the good work!

devanflores8• 5 years ago

I just removed the registration wall. Feel free to use the site without signing up

jmuguy• 5 years ago

Searching for your placeholder, "new york style pizza", returns no results.

benbristow• 5 years ago

Just searching for pizza doesn't even return pizza recipes. Just pizza dough and Italian nachos (with a picture of a pizza which isn't even anything like the finished product apparently).

Meanwhile I can go to Google or Bing and find actual Pizza recipes with a box at the top dedicated to recipes.

devanflores8• 5 years ago

Hi all, after hearing all the feedback, I decided to remove the registration wall behind the website. Feel free to use the website as desired. If anyone is interested in contributing their feedback to the product and testing new features, please feel free to register as I will be reaching out to newly registered users

ignoramous• 5 years ago

Fun fact, Shay Bannon created Compass (precursor to Elastic.co) for a recipe search engine: https://archive.is/dlrIF

Big shoes to fill (:

xwdv• 5 years ago

The great thing about this is that I don’t have to read (skip) a fucking preamble before each recipe about why this dish reminds the author of that time they spent a summer backpacking through Europe with their boyfriend. Keep it up.

davestephens• 5 years ago

It must be hard work to push that "jump to recipe" button that features on pretty much every food blog on the planet.

what_is_orcas2• 5 years ago

No results for "falafel".

I really want this to work, I love the filter options that I see (assuming they work) and I'd love to use something like this instead of Google/Bing (where the top-recommendations are all ads or super bloggy).

devanflores8• 5 years ago

Hey! That's the goal. I will admit the database is small because I'm adding them manually but I'm working on finding a way to scrape recipes automatically. In the meantime, the tradeoff for the better user experience is less recipes

what_is_orcas2• 5 years ago

Is there a way to help out with that? I just take screenshots of recipes on my phone because I hate the modern internet. If I could enter in a url and you could scrape the recipe off of that page, that'd be great (for others).

Out of curiosity, is this a hobby-project or something you're going to try to make money off of?

dunham• 5 years ago

A lot of web sites have a chunk of json-ld in a script tag, which greatly eases recipe scraping. (I think they mostly do this for google search.)

Riverheart• 5 years ago

I've taken to searching food manufacturer and grocery store websites for recipes. Since they're selling you the ingredients there are no ads, although recipes are more limited in scope.

For instance https://mahatmarice.com/recipes/

If you want falafel I'd find a falafel brand's website.

i_am_proteus• 5 years ago

King Arthur's recipe collection is a treasure trove: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes

mattjenner• 5 years ago

The database is far too small, go and really populate it & come back! this is an awesome idea, when you are ready.

I was confused though, there appears to be no long story involving a grandmother and a rat named terry who used to nibble at the candles in your cabin. ETC! ;-)

pleb_nz• 5 years ago

No results for kumara in either search.

Good luck, be good to see something like this working.

Be good to see recipes and ingredients from many cultures and not be western heavy.

chrismatei• 5 years ago

Just to add my 2 cents. This is great ideea and for sure I can see the use of it. But the email part, that is not somehting I would do for a recipe. Next, the you can add planner and you will have any nutritionist on this site giving you the emails. and they can fine tune the data you have. Ofc "suggest or improve recipe" is a very good ideea :) best of luck.

blueblob• 5 years ago

The search does not recognize what are individual components nor what should be in the title of a recipe. If I search for "white bread," I get recipes that don't include white bread as an ingredient and are not for white bread. I get mussel recipes that include "white wine" and say to dip bread in the broth. It's ultimately not a useful search.

igorrek• 5 years ago

I really like the idea. I have something similar, but it's only my collection of excellent recipes at lindyrecipe.com

Much more basic idea, basically a blog with curated recipes.

languagehacker• 5 years ago

Hope you're at least scraping the recipe wiki or something. This just doesn't seem like enough recipes.

beamatronic• 5 years ago

Has anyone trained a neural net to categorize web pages automatically?

lambic• 5 years ago

I used to use a recipe site that had a really good search engine but they got rid of it for unknown reasons. I hope this one stays around.

One thing that old one had was the ability to exclude ingredients as well as include which came in handy when I was cooking for jewish friends.

hichamino• 5 years ago

Paid subscription

ziggus• 5 years ago

Why would I use this when Google returns fantastic recipe options at the top of any recipe-related search results page, including pictures, ratings, and an ingredients summary?

dbcurtis• 5 years ago

Because all the current recipe sites are cesspools of adverts, unnecessary and distracting write-ups, and obfuscated printability? They are poster children for much of what makes the current web a miserable chore to use.

mikeg8• 5 years ago

No results for "lamb". This should have been way more complete before sharing here.

ABraidotti• 5 years ago

searching for lamb results in: Oh no! Your search returned no results. Try entering a less specific name.

Ungulate seemed promising, but similarly returned nothing. Maybe a generic name next?

throwanem• 5 years ago

I tried Eukaryota, but also didn't get anything. One assumes their implementation of full taxonomic search is still on the roadmap somewhere...

marginalia_nu• 5 years ago

Looks pretty promising. There seems to be quite a lot of frustration with finding recipes, so I think there is a market for something like this.

If you are looking for ways to improve the relevance of the search results, try to prioritize results that contain the exact search terms in the title, then some of the terms in the title, and then in the description, and then in the ingredients.

It's pretty tricky to get right, but I don't think you are that far off.

I'd also get rid of the email fishing popovers, it's very off-putting.

abeppu• 5 years ago

I think being a "search engine" but starting with a very small database of recipes is not gonna help anyone. I tried searching for recipes by ingredient:

- "bok choy" 0 results

- "bok choi" 0 results

- "arugula" 0 results

- "rocket" 1 result (but for oysters rockefeller, which doesn't list rocket as an ingredient)

- "eggplant" 1 result

If the collection is that small, then maybe people should be able to browse, rather than search?

But even then, it doesn't seem actually useful. The site does let you "search" without entering a query at all, which at least shows me a page with more than one recipe. I filtered by "vegetarian" as a dietary restriction, and saw stuff, at least. I scrolled until I saw a "Pasta Salad" recipe which stated it takes 835 minutes! Curious as to how that could possibly be, I tried to click through ... only to arrive at a page for "Mini Southwestern Corn Pup Muffins with Fiesta Dipping Sauce" covered by a "Welcome Back" sign-in modal. I can see under the modal that one of the ingredients is "hot dogs", so in addition to taking me to a different result than I had clicked on, it also seems to have taken me to something that didn't match my explicit filter criteria. After dismissing the modal I see that the page for this "result" isn't even the recipe; I have to click through to go to allrecipes. I return to my "Munchy" tab and try to go back to the list, and see that on load, it cleared my dietary restriction filter.

mritchie712• 5 years ago

Agreed.

Adding two common things also gives you 0 results (e.g. beef and rice).

hunter2_2• 5 years ago

"rocket" 1 result (but for oysters rockefeller, which doesn't list rocket as an ingredient)

Seems like an inappropriate fuzz filter. Maybe swap it out for one that just does proper stem matching.

The really weird part is that this occurs not only with the regular title search, but also the ingredient search, and none of this recipe's ingredients have a fuzzy match whatsoever. Wat?!

rcoveson2• 5 years ago

It's even worse than I thought. I simply put in their suggested ingredient to search on: rice. Of the four results I clicked on, only one actually used rice. The other three used rice flour or rice wine vinegar. Technically correct but totally misses the spirit of a useful ingredient search.

rcoveson2• 5 years ago

A few other thoughts:

1. Instead of hosting the images yourself, you're linking directly to Meredith Corp's image servers. They probably won't appreciate that; if you scaled this out enough they'd likely ban your referrer (and that's if copyright doesn't turn out to be a bigger issue first).

2. 199 recipes is too few. I'd say you don't really have anything to demo, or a good dataset to experiment with on your side, until you have tens of thousands.

3. Your search-by-ingredient and search-by-name both do the same thing; they just make a words list and set it as the query for MeiliSearch. Meaning it just fuzzy matches against all the attributes of every document in the database. That's not any more helpful than a generic search engine. I expect a purpose-specific search engine to take advantage of its domain knowledge; e.g. it should:

i. Know ingredient synonyms

ii. Recognize when an ingredient a trivial product of another ingredient (e.g. egg whites are trivial from eggs, but rice vinegar is not trivial from rice).

iii. Other than those two cases, ingredients matches should not be fuzzy. It's no good if baking power matches when all I have is baking soda, or if buttermilk matches when I have butter.

4. The documents in your database are not well curated (which will make #3 more difficult). You're actually leaning pretty heavily on fuzzy matching. For example, in the DB "vegetarian" is misspelled as "vegatarian". And many ingredients have leading whitespace, including newline characters. Keep your DB clean and you'll be able to take advantage of fuzzy matching when appropriate but still retain the ability to do exact matching.

ProfAesop• 5 years ago

I would appreciate a down to earth recipe database, with limited advertising, and limited SEO-pre-recipe content.

Too bad this wasn't it.

devwastaken• 5 years ago

I need a recipe for the best cookies that don't harden. Every website does the same ingredients and they're always rock hard cookies. I want recipes from actual bakeries, chef's.

dandelany• 5 years ago

I’m no chef, but I live in a dry climate, and for soft cookies I get good results by storing them in sealed containers with a slice of bread immediately after cooling. The moisture in the bread makes it like a humidor for your cookies so they stay soft longer :)

GarlicToum• 5 years ago

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

hunter2_2• 5 years ago

While not strictly incorrect, for those of us who do find it weird to see, can you change "less" to "fewer"?

Oh no! Your search returned no results. Try entering less ingredients.

Anyway, very cool!

dmitriid• 5 years ago

Any recipe should have links to wikipedia articles or to a descriptions of every ingredient.

So many times it's something like "jus use crunchy arugula flour with prime undercut ribsteaks, and season with spring twigs of muffinballs"

The world is global. And 99% of the world has no idea what it is you use in that recipe.

collegeburner2• 5 years ago

My problem with recipes is not that i cant find them, its that everything has 32 million results and i dont know which ones are good and which ones are crap. The "reviews" on sites never seem to correlate with good vs bad recipes. If I've eaten something before its kinda better but hard to find new dishes to make if I dont also know the recipe is probably good. Anybody have advice on good recipe sources?

slow_donkey• 5 years ago

I tried solving this with a search engine that accounted for reviews with some manual curation, but I realized there's actually an extremely limited set of 'good' recipe sites and kept returning the same 10 sites with a long tail of average sites.

You could improve upon this by establishing site authority for a topic (cuisine), but it still seemed pointless to me.

collegeburner2• 5 years ago

In the short term I'd appreciate some of those good recipe sites as I dont know what is better or worse. Would you mind sharing those 10 or so are good?

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

Most of the time - the recipes are pretty similar.

It's usually just a difference in spices, oils (or other fats), or emulsifiers. Or vegan / gluten free substitutes.

Nothing beats knowing your tastes and learning how to actually cook - then you can look at a recipe and know which things you'd rather substitute with something else and how and when, etc.

But are there any good websites for this?

mongol• 5 years ago

Yes I know what you mean. I think there should be a site that realizes that there are many variants of well known dishes, and they should be categorized as that. Very rarely is there an original, true recipe that is the pristine source for the dish. So when I search bearnaise sauce, I should not get a recipe, I should get a general description, kind of like a Wikipedia page. And then below that, all the different recipes, that can be contributed like on a wiki. Each recipe should have a feedback mechanism so the best ones gets upvoted.

symlinkk• 5 years ago

https://based.cooking is my current favorite.

If you have a NYTimes subscription, NYTimes Cooking is decent although the recipes tend to get a little over complicated and pretentious sometimes.

justinpombrio• 5 years ago

I hear (and have tasted) that the NYT recipes are both extensive and consistently good.

danielheath• 5 years ago

I have had pretty good luck with the product forums for the thermomix; the recipes are obviously written for that machine but it’s easy to repurpose them.

No ads, no seo, no life story.

lapetitejort• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that people want to make those "basic" ingredients that are often overlooked. Bread, vinegar, sauerkraut, even butter can be made from scratch at home. They're usually more labor and time intensive, and don't follow the "heat thing up and add to other thing" pattern, but the recipes are out there.

droptablemain• 5 years ago

Cool idea, but you need more data. A search for ingredient "rice" returns only 9 recipes.

Maybe scrape schema json-ld recipe data to help build your dataset?

jabo• 5 years ago

Oh hey I built a similar recipe search site with 2 Million recipes a couple of months ago, where you can search by recipe name or filter by ingredients:

https://recipe-search.typesense.org/

vlod• 5 years ago

Nice! I searched what I'm cooking this weekend and I got results: "rasta pasta"

mendeza• 5 years ago

Are there any good recipe search engines that are below 8Mb? Would be cool to create an on device application where space is really limited!

nmaley• 5 years ago

Pathetic site

rognjen• 5 years ago

Re: ingredients search

I don't think it's important to find a recipe that uses all of the ingredients. I think it might be better to find recipes that uses fewest additional ones.

Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes

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