11 ms·

Show HN: Instantly search 2M recipes

349 points by jabo 6y ago

jabo 6y ago
Some quick context: I was inspired to build this by this HN post earlier today [1]. So thank you glorf for making the recipe dataset available. Thought this would take me 1-2 hours to build, ended up taking about 6 hours - engineering estimates and all! > Details about the Tech Stack: The dataset has 2,231,142 recipes and is indexed on Typesense [2], an open source alternative to Algolia/ElasticSearch that a friend and I are working on. The UI was built using the Typesense adapter for InstantSearch.js [3] and is a static site bundled using ParcelJS. The app is hosted on S3, with CloudFront for a CDN. The search backend is powered by a geo-distributed 3-node Typesense cluster running on Typesense Cloud [4], with nodes in Oregon, Frankfurt and Mumbai. Here's the source code: https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 [2] https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense [3] https://github.com/typesense/typesense-instantsearch-adapter https://github.com/typesense/typesense-instantsearch-adapter [4] https://cloud.typesense.org https://cloud.typesense.org
- graderjs 6y ago
  Jason, sorry to ask here rather than read your GitHub docs, but how does Typesense fare against non-romance languages that can't be segmented by whitespace?
  - someone7x 6y ago
    > non-romance languages that can't be segmented by whitespace That can't be right? Surely Greek, Russian, Turkish, etc are whitespace delimited?
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Chinese and Japanese wouldn’t be.
    - graderjs 6y ago
      Yeah I meant some concept like "non-Latin derived" or "non-Roman alphabet" languages but then there's Cyrillic, etc. I was pretty sure "non-Romance" sounded like that right term, but not totally sure. I looked it up after and yeah, it wasn't. Actually I have no deep idea of the terms in this and just grabbed the first term that came to me. I thought I did pretty well and I appreciate the learning experience!
  - jabo 6y ago
    I'm guessing you meant to say logographic languages. We don't yet support tokenization for logographic languages (like Chinese, Japanese, etc) but it's on our medium-term radar: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/86 https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/86
    - graderjs 6y ago
      Basically...but I didn't know to use that term! So thanks for teaching me. Then there's also languages like Thai that are not whitespace separated on the word level, but that use an alphabet. So...I meant more 'non-Latin' but I think that's not actually a tight category. It's actually quite difficult to come up with the right term. I guess I was trying to be too clever, the best term is probably "non-whitespace delimited languages". Thanks for your response, and awesome speed to index the dataset and have it up and running in the same day. Could I ask you a few more questions? What was the dataset size? What was the size of your index? How long (and how much RAM) did it take to index the dataset and what machine (and how many cores) did you do it on?
      - jabo 6y ago
        > Then there's also languages like Thai that are not whitespace separated on the word level, but that use an alphabet. I did not know that! Good to know. > What was the dataset size? 2.2GB in size, with ~2.2M records > What was the size of your index? 2.7GB > How long (and how much RAM) did it take to index the dataset It took about 8 minutes to index that data. Typesense stores the entire index in memory, so the index took 2.7GB in RAM > What machine (and how many cores) did you do it on? It's running on a 3-node cluster, with each node having 4vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. The nodes are distributed across data centers, so search requests are served by the closest node (like a CDN).
        graderjs 6y ago
        That's great, thank you for that info! Very impressive performance specs for your indexing.
- jftuga 6y ago
  Did you use CloudFormation to crate the infra? If not, I'd love to hear some details on how you did this. Any API Gateway being used? Seems to be offline at the moment.
  - jabo 6y ago
    The front-end is a static site. I used terraform to setup the S3 bucket & Cloudfront. The search backend is running on Typesense Cloud, which is point and click to provision. This is my 1-line deployment command: https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search/blob/7b5cab6da442467d60acc3bcd8a71e53f04e8b9c/package.json#L11 https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search/blob/7b5... That's it for the infra! No API Gateway. Hmmm, seems to be up for me. Could you show me a console+browser screenshot of what you see?
    - blntechie 6y ago
      We run similarly on CloudFormation. Interesting with the ‘aws s3 cp’ command. I started using ‘aws s3 sync —delete’ nowadays after having issues with pre cleanup required for ‘cp’.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - jabo 6y ago
        In my case since the assets have fingerprinted filenames and index.html references them, if I delete old files with each deployment, then a user who has a cached version of index.html will see a broken page. So I just leave old asset files as is.
- the_arun 6y ago
  Very nicely done! Also, appreciate sharing due credit to dependent stories.
- amluto 6y ago
  You have a UI bug: dismissing the modal recipe popup isn’t entirely reliable, and the site can get stuck in a state that doesn’t allow user interaction. This even survives the back button.
  - jabo 6y ago
    Hmm interesting, I can't seem to replicate this issue. What browser are you using?
    - amluto 6y ago
      iOS 14’s Safari. It only happened once.
- vincentmarle 6y ago
  Thanks I was just looking for a cheap alternative for a search engine just today (Algolia is cool but very expensive if you need to index millions of records) - I will check out Typesense.
- ajitk 6y ago
  This is refreshingly fast! Definitely going to try typesense in my projects.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  Type sense is looking great! I was going to use it on a side project. Not sure why I didn’t but it must have been missing something I needed. Been using meilisearch but I’ll definitely be checking out typesense again. Huge fan of instant search results, well done!
- yawnxyz 6y ago
  it boggles my mind that a two person team built Typesense...
- mariushn 6y ago
  Hi! Would typesense be good for a general web page search system (algolia-like), or it's designed for structured entities only (products, recipes...) Why did you built it instead of using other open source engines? eg postgres text search
  - jabo 6y ago
    Typesense would indeed be good for a general web page search system, just like Algolia. In fact, even Algolia stores web page data as structured JSON entities. re: why not just postgres text search, I'll post a more detailed response in the github issue you opened (thank you) for posterity: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/167 https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/167
    - mariushn 6y ago
      Thanks :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
guillem_lefait 6y ago
Fast enough and good idea to showcase Typesense. Well done ! On a UX perspective, I would add a link from the recipe title to the recipe page.
- jabo 6y ago
  Thank you! re: UX, I was trying to prevent accidental clicks to an external (ad-ridden) site from the search result cards. The little icon on the bottom right takes you to the source though.
murrkeys 6y ago
Very nice! I will definitely be using. Quick question, are the recipes sorted by anything?
- jabo 6y ago
  I unfortunately did not find a good field to sort by in the original dataset. So it's just sorted by text match relevance scores, then the order that they appear in the dataset.
  - chanux 6y ago
    I too will be using! Didn't really expect to see much when I searched for "Sri Lankan". Boy was I pleasantly surprised!
woleium 6y ago
your import seems to have omitted slashes from 1/2 measurements, e.g. 6 chicken breasts, cut into 2 inch cubes 2 eggs 2 cups breadcrumbs 12 cup olive oil 12 cup white wine 12 lemon, juice of 3 garlic cloves, chopped 1 teaspoon dried oregano 12 teaspoon dried parsley
- jabo 6y ago
  Uh oh! I hope I didn’t ruin anyone’s evening. Fixing it.
  - jabo 6y ago
    Hmmm, I spot checked a couple of records and I do see the / in measurements: https://imgur.com/IhBMBBD https://imgur.com/IhBMBBD Could you give an example record that doesn't have the right measurements? I can then verify with the source dataset, to see if it's an indexing bug.
    - mrrsm 6y ago
      Shouldn't that be 1/2 of a green pepper and 1/4 cup blue cheese?
      - jabo 6y ago
        Hmm, I'd think so too. Looks like the source dataset [1] has it wrong :( This is how it shows up (CSV format): 2230984,Buffalo Chicken Pizza!,"[""1 (9 3/4 ounce) canswanson premium white chunk chicken breast in water, drained"", ""2 tablespoons butter, melted"", ""1 (10 ounce) packageprepared thin pizza crust (12-inch)"", ""12 of a green pepper, thinly sliced"", ""14 cup crumbled blue cheese""]","[""Heat the oven to 425F Stir the chicken, hot sauce and butter in a medium bowl."", ""Spread the chicken mixture on the pizza crust to within 1/2-inch of the edge."", ""Top with the pepper and cheese."", ""Bake for 10 minutes or until the chicken mixture is hot and bubbling.""]",www.food.com/recipe/buffalo-chicken-pizza-394731,Recipes1M,"[""chicken"", ""butter"", ""crust"", ""green pepper"", ""blue cheese""]" I'll see if I can open a PR with the fix. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
ibudiallo 6y ago
Very fast and very nice. One thing that can be improved is the way the history is populated. Right now, every time a search is performed, a new entry is added to history. I was thinking how to spell Cauliflower as I was typing, now I have to press the back button for each character I typed. It will make more sense to only add a history entry when the input is blurred - onblur()
- jabo 6y ago
  Ah yes, good catch. I'll fix that history issue. Btw, the search backend has typo tolerance enabled. So you should be able to get away with typos as bad as "cliflowre" and still get the right results: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/?r%5Bquery%5D=cliflowre https://recipe-search.typesense.org/?r%5Bquery%5D=cliflowre
nelsonenzo 6y ago
chrome wouldn't load it without a valid ssl cert. I'm very interested in seeing this though. Direct message me if you want a bit of free help with the infra. in the meantime, is the recipe dataset open sourced and available somewhere, for other builders?
- jabo 6y ago
  Hmmm, I do see a valid cert on my end: https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc Could you show me a screenshot of what cert gets loaded for you? I did switch between infra providers in the last few hours. So I wonder if you're hitting the older infra due to stale DNS. I got the dataset from this other Show HN post from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
  - nelsonenzo 6y ago
    It's working for me now. I think my company's internet vpn was blocking it, bad on me. Thanks for the info and site. It's super cool!
netsharc 6y ago
As an SI unit user who's been looking up more recipes during lockdown, the whole cups, spoons, etc, units of measurements are really annoying. Some recipe sites have on the fly conversion, it would be nice to have here as well, but my first look didn't inspire much confidence that this site will go anywhere (Example search: pizza, top result: fruit pizza. Ohkayyy...)
- jabo 6y ago
  I unfortunately did not find a good field to sort by in the original dataset from earlier today [1]. So it's just sorted by text match relevance scores, and then the order that they appear in the dataset. I'm hoping they publish a popularity metric, which will fix the issues like the one you pointed out. Or, once I have sufficient data on popular searches from this site, I can append that metric to the dataset. Early stages, so please pardon the dust in the meantime! re: SI units, I hear you. There's definitely scope for improvement! :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
royaltjames 6y ago
This rules! SO FAST Search 'vegan' and Colorful Guac displays Ingredients 2 large ripe avocados 1 lime juice 2 garlic cloves, Minced 13 cup choppled scallion 13 cup choped red bell pepper 14 12 ounces diced tomatoes with jalapenos 14 cup snipped fresh cilantro 2 tablespoons Braggs liquid aminos
- alejohausner 6y ago
  With all those scallions, and that massive amount of cilantro you won't be able to taste the avocado. This reads more like some sort of chutney. /s
mc32 6y ago
I’d love if this had a recommendation engine like punchfork[1] [had[2]] has. That said the search is nicer than Yummly so I’ll have to give it a try. [1]https://www.punchfork.com/ https://www.punchfork.com/ [2] Nice to see they are back to being independent after Pinterest bought them out sometime back.
- bostonvaulter2 6y ago
  Yeah the search could use some improvements. The firs result for "pizza" is "Fruit Cookie Pizza" which I think almost no-one searching for pizza will want.
  - jabo 6y ago
    I unfortunately did not find a good field to sort by in the original dataset from earlier today [1]. So it's just sorted by text match relevance scores, and then the order that they appear in the dataset. I'm hoping they publish a popularity metric, which will fix the issues like the one you pointed out. Or, once I have sufficient data on popular searches from this site, I can append that metric to the dataset. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
drfuchs 6y ago
How do I tell it I really want to search for just "harissa" and not "Harrison", "Harriet", "Harris", "harrissee", etc.? I tried putting it in quotes, but no such luck.
- jabo 6y ago
  This is not possible at the moment, but it's on my todo list.
- ilovefood 6y ago
  This was my first search too lol! I just love harissa :)
reificator 6y ago
Have you considered the ability to filter out recipes that don't contain a particular ingredient? Obvious use cases are food allergies and dislikes in general. My specific use case is that I searched `guacamole` and got 2k that contained `salt` but only 1.8k that contained `avocados`. I want to see the recipes that don't use avocados. EDIT: It appears that `avocados` and `avocado` are separate ingredients, as are `tomatoes` and `tomato`. I know pluralization rules are hard, particularly in English, but any chance of a cleanup pass for the... low hanging fruit?
- jabo 6y ago
  Ah interesting use case with food allergies and exclusions. Added this to my todo list. I see what you did there with low hanging fruit! I'll take a pass at de-duping plurals in ingredients. Good catch!
  - js2 6y ago
    Not just allergies. I was just looking for biscotti recipes and there's basically two styles of biscotti: made with butter (the soft chewy kind) and made without (the crispy you'd better have a drink to dip it in kind). It's impossible to search for the latter without excluding butter.
- dc443 6y ago
  As an avocado fan I have trouble grappling with the concept of guac made without them. Isn't that sorta like orange juice made from things that are not oranges? Feels almost oxymoronic. Good suggestion though.
  - reificator 6y ago
    When I say "I want to see the recipes without avocados" it's kind of like when you witness a car crash. You're not looking because you want to see someone crash, you're looking because it's horrifying. Same with avocado-less guacamole. The concept is horrifying so I need to know. And yes, I would absolutely love to see the recipes for orange juice that don't include any oranges for the same reason. Either way though, I think it's just because `avocado` and `avocados` are counted as different ingredients.
blorenz 6y ago
This is great! I thought that I could filter on ingredients with an intersection of those ingredients and instead got the union. I would love if this could toggle between those and possibly the exclusion as well.
- jabo 6y ago
  Added to my todo list, to toggle between AND / OR when filtering by ingredients.
lowdanie 6y ago
Very nice. One issue I noticed: I looked up Chana Masala and the first recipe (Vegan Chana Masala) calls for “12 tsp salt” but the source calls for “1/2 tsp salt” :)
- jabo 6y ago
  This is unfortunately an issue with the source dataset that I got from here[1]. I've now added a prominent warning to the UI, to check with the original site if the ingredient measurements seem off. Don't want any ruined dinners on my hands! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
s1mon 6y ago
Very fast and interesting, but I couldn't figure out how to search for ingredients like lime leaf. If I search for "salmon lime leaf" in the title section, none of the top hits have lime leaf in them. If I search in the ingredients section, I get variations on limes (juice, zest, etc.) but no lime leaf. Curiously, if I just search for "lime leaf" in the title (without salmon) I get things that have lime leaf in them.
- jabo 6y ago
  The top bar only searches within recipe titles. So if a recipe title has those keywords, it will show up in the results. The best way to search for ingredients would be in the sidebar. In this particular example, the issue is that the source dataset [1] has "lime leaves" in plural, so if you click on "show more" in the sidebar after searching for "lime", you should see it in the list. I'm going to work on normalizing singular / plural ingredients as much as I can as part of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25368628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25368628 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
atonse 6y ago
Seeing as this is likely an open source algolia, can this be used for searching logs?
- jabo 6y ago
  If it can fit in memory, yes. But TBH, logs are a unique beast in that searches are usually temporal and only a tiny portion of the dataset is typically queried. So it will be wasteful to store the entire index in memory 24x7, which is what Typesense (and Algolia) do. ElasticSearch on the other hand has mastered searching log datasets by storing the primary index on disk, so I'd recommend using ES for log data, instead of Algolia / Typesense. The tradeoff with ES is performance, since the ES index needs to be fetched from disk. For any other structured dataset (like the dataset in this app), Typesense would be a good fit.
  - atonse 6y ago
    Thanks for that detailed answer. That really helped me understand the tradeoffs which in hindsight seem obvious :-) We currently use Algolia for 3 public sites and will further explore TypeSense for something like this for a site that hosts healthcare patient info. And will stick to our original plan of setting up elasticsearch for logs.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I can't access the bag and it's stuck in a loop of "Warning Potential Security Risk" Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized. HTTP Strict Transport Security: false HTTP Public Key Pinning: false
- jabo 6y ago
  Hmmm, I do see a valid cert on my end: https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc Could you show me a screenshot of what cert gets loaded for you? I did switch between infra providers earlier today. So I wonder if you're hitting the older infra due to stale DNS.
cpard 6y ago
It is amazing how fast the pages render. Amazing work, even if it took 6 instead of 1 hour!!
- jabo 6y ago
  Thank you!
rsfern 6y ago
Nice! Is there a way to get a link to a specific entry rather than just the full list of query results?
- jabo 6y ago
  If you click on the little icon on the bottom right of each search result card, that should take you to the source website from where the recipe is from.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Ah, it does, but I'd like to second the suggestion to put the domain name at the bottom. All the cards I looked at looked like they had room. First, it makes a big difference to me if it's from a site I know and trust. Second, I think that clear attribution is a good thing, even if you may be legally in the clear for copyright.
nojito 6y ago
Great idea and works quite well. However, it's generally frowned upon to show the actual directions for a recipe. Which is why you see most recipe aggregators only show ingredients and link directly to the source to get the actual directions
motyar 6y ago
Wow it's super fast. Someone please make this over web archive data, for web search.
- jabo 6y ago
  If you have a structured dataset, I can build an instant search experience around it!
- GarlicToum 6y ago
  I did that! Feel free to take a look at https://garlictoum.com https://garlictoum.com - it crawls recipe sites and indexes them while providing some nice filtering!
xs 6y ago
Wait a minute... What about copyright? Like I would love to have a blog where I can just copy and paste my favorite recipes, and add a few notes myself. But I don't do that because it seems like plagiarism. Or another option is to use this site, and then use some kind of 1-5 star rating. And then just see my favorites without all the other bs that food sites show you.
- jabo 6y ago
  I got the source dataset from this Show HN earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 Here's a comment thread that talks about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358813
- yojo 6y ago
  IANAL, but as I understand it the ingredient list is not copyright able, though the description may contain sufficient creative content to qualify. There’s even an FAQ covering it. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    From your linked page: > However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Emphasis mine. A website full of recipes certainly seems to be a collection in the sense protecting a cookbook.
- kaetemi 6y ago
  Copyrights apply to the literal text of a recipe, but not to a recipe itself. Recipes are not copyrightable last time I checked, just the literal text.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    A collection of recipes is copyrightable though. I think recipe vs collection of recipes is one of the canonical examples.
russellbeattie 6y ago
I'd make the title of the recipe the link to the summary, rather than the "Read Cooking Directions" text, which is sort of confusingly worded. Do you "cook" salad? Also, as others have said, you're going to get sued if the originator of the recipe isn't linked prominently.
abhinavsharma 6y ago
This is really good. I would love to integrate this as an extension into our mobile browser. Hope that’s ok. https://insightbrowser.com/collections/cooking https://insightbrowser.com/collections/cooking Also I wanted to mention that the most important piece of metadata we’ve learnt about that users care about after ingredients is the website it’s sourced from. It’d be great to have that
- jabo 6y ago
  I actually sourced the aggregate dataset from this other Show HN earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 I do include the source website in the search results. It's the little icon on the bottom right of the search result card and it's also linked from the modal that opens up if you click on "Read cooking directions".
  - abhinavsharma 6y ago
    Oh cool I think you may have just hit the API limit for favicons if you use one from the HN traffic https://share.icloud.com/photos/0XKxqxHuzZV-7sO2wOx0y53YQ https://share.icloud.com/photos/0XKxqxHuzZV-7sO2wOx0y53YQ
    - jabo 6y ago
      That's actually the icon I intended to show! :) It's an icon of a ticket that gets printed in restaurant kitchens.
      - abhinavsharma 6y ago
        I see, that’s cool but I was referencing something different — That it was important for users to quickly recognize the publisher on the search result page itself. They develop more trust with some sources than others. I wasn’t able to discern that. But if your goal is to showcase search capabilities to developers instead of a daily driver search engine it wouldn’t matter much.
rglover 6y ago
I've been looking for an Algolia-style alternative (in terms of result quality/fuzziness) and this is great. Definitely going to use this on a project soon.
Semaphor 6y ago
This looks great! A small bug: Filtering by ingredient "Sugar" gives results like "Sugar free" and "no-sugar-added". And a small UX request: Have the recipe not just be a JS modal, I want to be able to open them in a new tab.
- isuckatcoding 6y ago
  I don’t count that as bug but I see what you mean۔ The search engine only has so much context about the content.
kaetemi 6y ago
I'd be more interested if it could also automatically convert between voodoo and actual metric measurements.
d23 6y ago
This is awesome. If nothing else, the ability to view a recipe without having to scroll through a 10 page story about the first time the author saw an avocado makes it worth it.
- baxtr 6y ago
  Yeah true. I hate how simple recipe site have been bloated with a) trackers b) ads and c) long text to improve their SEO. Finding "just the recipe" has a great value for me nowadays.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Once upon a time, yummly was this
chrysoprace 6y ago
Really love this, but I do see that there are some formatting issues on some recipes. I found that when I was looking into recipe-scraping solutions there were only certain compatible sites since they were formatted so differently, and often they would have to make updates for sites that their their formatting. Impressive all the same! Keen to dive into the source and learning a bit.
ponker 6y ago
I searched for “cubeb” to find recipes which use this spice. It was changed to “cubed” with no way to revert.
blondin 6y ago
this is quite amazing and also inspiring! thanks for doing this and showcasing typesense.
captn3m0 6y ago
Suggestion: Add open search support, so browsers prompt me to add it as a search backend. I added it to Firefox with the "eat" keyword so typing "eat butter chicken" gets me straight to the results page.
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
Very, very impressive. One small nitpick: The result ulrs don't behave like regular links. Can you open the recipe, preferably the original url, in a new tab when a middle click happens on a 'Read Cooking Directions' link?
- jabo 6y ago
  Yup, updated it!
haser_au 6y ago
@Jabo: Great site. Some errors though, for example the "4 Ingredient Sauce for Roasted Lamb" says to use 12 cups of brown sugar. The source site has 1/2 cup (0.5), so I'm guessing it's a scraping issue. Wouldn't want to give someone diabetes with their lamb!
- haser_au 6y ago
  Related Issue ticket https://github.com/Glorf/recipenlg/issues/3#issuecomment-742345537 https://github.com/Glorf/recipenlg/issues/3#issuecomment-742...
baxtr 6y ago
This is really great! I will use that going forward :) Two things to consider: a) put it onto a real domain. it's a great product, it deserves a domain :) b) make the links clickable. They have the same color as the links below and I tried to click them with no success.
- jabo 6y ago
  Any ideas for a domain name? You know what they say about naming things... :) Just made the links clickable!
speedupmate 6y ago
@Jabo although search is really great you instantly know the quality of recipes is "aggregated or marketing" junk when one recipe contains quantities in millilitres, mystical cups and a oven temp in unknown centigrade scale so heres a idea for you to automatically rate those things by just investigating unknowns and either help them to be converted to multiple centigrade scales, and single/multiple comparable metrics you've achieved the ultimate you are missing direct links to search results, to single search result and it's hell of a task to find a link to click that opens the little modal with recipe information (click on square should be enough)
- mahesh_rm 6y ago
  >> quantities in millilitres, mystical cups and a oven temp in unknown centigrade scale As somebody who likes to cook and has not the slightest idea of what Farnheits, Ozs, Yards, Feet, Gallons, are, nor anything about how Freedom Unit Related & Co. converts to simple decimal metric measures, you are speaking Klingon.
- lopis 6y ago
  Cups, spoons, etc, are convertible to millilitres. Most recipes call for pre-heated over at 180ºC unless states otherwise. Cooking does not observe reproducible builds. You always, always needs to taste, poke, look. If your flour is of a different type of grain or not as fine, if you use different varieties of vegetables, or if your kitchen is a few degrees warmer or cooler, you WILL get different results. So go ahead and use any mystical cup you want. Ingredient proportions are what matters. If you fail, write down what went wrong so you know better next time.
  - someone7x 6y ago
    I've been cooking and programming for a long time now and wholeheartedly agree with everything you said except the default oven temp thing. Baking is a cargo cult of chemistry and I'd say most folks are well advised to follow those recipes exactly.
maddyboo 6y ago
This is cool! It seems like a great way to find recipes altered for special diets like vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, keto, etc.
vikin9 6y ago
Inability to open selected recipes in a new tab (e.g., to read later) is really annoying
ysoft 6y ago
My team used typesense for a recent project. 16 million records combined with https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/building-search-ui/what-is-instantsearch/react/ https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/building-search-ui/what-i.... Really fast and worth the investment. It doesn't have all the enterprise features of ES or Solr but for basic search features it's great.
- karterk 6y ago
  What features are you missing?
hpeinar 6y ago
It seems that the index has dropped. All searches are getting 503 as a result right now: "Not Ready".
kgdinesh 6y ago
The page doesn't load for me (Location: Chennai, India)
rodrigoalviani 6y ago
Is not working
tagawa 6y ago
Love the concept but please could you show the domain name of the source websites? I use that as a filter for quality and it's time-consuming hovering over the source icon to see the linked URL in the status bar for each recipe.
bulldog13 6y ago
This is really neat! My challenge with random recipes from the internet is they are all 4 or 5 stars, but sometimes they are kind of gross :/ Can anyone recommend a curated recipe list / website even if it is pay.
thamer 6y ago
Congrats! This is a great start. It's impressive how fast it is, even if this mostly says something about the state of the web today. 2M recipes is a huge database, and without any indication of the quality of a recipe this makes it really hard to tell which ones are worth trying. I hope you can add some sort of rating system in the future.

349 points by jabo 6y ago

jabo 6y ago

Some quick context: I was inspired to build this by this HN post earlier today [1]. So thank you glorf for making the recipe dataset available. Thought this would take me 1-2 hours to build, ended up taking about 6 hours - engineering estimates and all! > Details about the Tech Stack: The dataset has 2,231,142 recipes and is indexed on Typesense [2], an open source alternative to Algolia/ElasticSearch that a friend and I are working on. The UI was built using the Typesense adapter for InstantSearch.js [3] and is a static site bundled using ParcelJS. The app is hosted on S3, with CloudFront for a CDN. The search backend is powered by a geo-distributed 3-node Typesense cluster running on Typesense Cloud [4], with nodes in Oregon, Frankfurt and Mumbai. Here's the source code: https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 [2] https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense [3] https://github.com/typesense/typesense-instantsearch-adapter https://github.com/typesense/typesense-instantsearch-adapter [4] https://cloud.typesense.org https://cloud.typesense.org

graderjs 6y ago
Jason, sorry to ask here rather than read your GitHub docs, but how does Typesense fare against non-romance languages that can't be segmented by whitespace?
- someone7x 6y ago
  > non-romance languages that can't be segmented by whitespace That can't be right? Surely Greek, Russian, Turkish, etc are whitespace delimited?
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Chinese and Japanese wouldn’t be.
  - graderjs 6y ago
    Yeah I meant some concept like "non-Latin derived" or "non-Roman alphabet" languages but then there's Cyrillic, etc. I was pretty sure "non-Romance" sounded like that right term, but not totally sure. I looked it up after and yeah, it wasn't. Actually I have no deep idea of the terms in this and just grabbed the first term that came to me. I thought I did pretty well and I appreciate the learning experience!
- jabo 6y ago
  I'm guessing you meant to say logographic languages. We don't yet support tokenization for logographic languages (like Chinese, Japanese, etc) but it's on our medium-term radar: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/86 https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/86
  - graderjs 6y ago
    Basically...but I didn't know to use that term! So thanks for teaching me. Then there's also languages like Thai that are not whitespace separated on the word level, but that use an alphabet. So...I meant more 'non-Latin' but I think that's not actually a tight category. It's actually quite difficult to come up with the right term. I guess I was trying to be too clever, the best term is probably "non-whitespace delimited languages". Thanks for your response, and awesome speed to index the dataset and have it up and running in the same day. Could I ask you a few more questions? What was the dataset size? What was the size of your index? How long (and how much RAM) did it take to index the dataset and what machine (and how many cores) did you do it on?
    - jabo 6y ago
      > Then there's also languages like Thai that are not whitespace separated on the word level, but that use an alphabet. I did not know that! Good to know. > What was the dataset size? 2.2GB in size, with ~2.2M records > What was the size of your index? 2.7GB > How long (and how much RAM) did it take to index the dataset It took about 8 minutes to index that data. Typesense stores the entire index in memory, so the index took 2.7GB in RAM > What machine (and how many cores) did you do it on? It's running on a 3-node cluster, with each node having 4vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. The nodes are distributed across data centers, so search requests are served by the closest node (like a CDN).
      - graderjs 6y ago
        That's great, thank you for that info! Very impressive performance specs for your indexing.
jftuga 6y ago
Did you use CloudFormation to crate the infra? If not, I'd love to hear some details on how you did this. Any API Gateway being used? Seems to be offline at the moment.
- jabo 6y ago
  The front-end is a static site. I used terraform to setup the S3 bucket & Cloudfront. The search backend is running on Typesense Cloud, which is point and click to provision. This is my 1-line deployment command: https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search/blob/7b5cab6da442467d60acc3bcd8a71e53f04e8b9c/package.json#L11 https://github.com/typesense/showcase-recipe-search/blob/7b5... That's it for the infra! No API Gateway. Hmmm, seems to be up for me. Could you show me a console+browser screenshot of what you see?
  - blntechie 6y ago
    We run similarly on CloudFormation. Interesting with the ‘aws s3 cp’ command. I started using ‘aws s3 sync —delete’ nowadays after having issues with pre cleanup required for ‘cp’.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jabo 6y ago
      In my case since the assets have fingerprinted filenames and index.html references them, if I delete old files with each deployment, then a user who has a cached version of index.html will see a broken page. So I just leave old asset files as is.
the_arun 6y ago
Very nicely done! Also, appreciate sharing due credit to dependent stories.
amluto 6y ago
You have a UI bug: dismissing the modal recipe popup isn’t entirely reliable, and the site can get stuck in a state that doesn’t allow user interaction. This even survives the back button.
- jabo 6y ago
  Hmm interesting, I can't seem to replicate this issue. What browser are you using?
  - amluto 6y ago
    iOS 14’s Safari. It only happened once.
vincentmarle 6y ago
Thanks I was just looking for a cheap alternative for a search engine just today (Algolia is cool but very expensive if you need to index millions of records) - I will check out Typesense.
ajitk 6y ago
This is refreshingly fast! Definitely going to try typesense in my projects.
dawnerd 6y ago
Type sense is looking great! I was going to use it on a side project. Not sure why I didn’t but it must have been missing something I needed. Been using meilisearch but I’ll definitely be checking out typesense again. Huge fan of instant search results, well done!
yawnxyz 6y ago
it boggles my mind that a two person team built Typesense...
mariushn 6y ago
Hi! Would typesense be good for a general web page search system (algolia-like), or it's designed for structured entities only (products, recipes...) Why did you built it instead of using other open source engines? eg postgres text search
- jabo 6y ago
  Typesense would indeed be good for a general web page search system, just like Algolia. In fact, even Algolia stores web page data as structured JSON entities. re: why not just postgres text search, I'll post a more detailed response in the github issue you opened (thank you) for posterity: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/167 https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/167
  - mariushn 6y ago
    Thanks :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

guillem_lefait 6y ago

Fast enough and good idea to showcase Typesense. Well done ! On a UX perspective, I would add a link from the recipe title to the recipe page.

jabo 6y ago
Thank you! re: UX, I was trying to prevent accidental clicks to an external (ad-ridden) site from the search result cards. The little icon on the bottom right takes you to the source though.

murrkeys 6y ago

Very nice! I will definitely be using. Quick question, are the recipes sorted by anything?

jabo 6y ago
I unfortunately did not find a good field to sort by in the original dataset. So it's just sorted by text match relevance scores, then the order that they appear in the dataset.
- chanux 6y ago
  I too will be using! Didn't really expect to see much when I searched for "Sri Lankan". Boy was I pleasantly surprised!

woleium 6y ago

your import seems to have omitted slashes from 1/2 measurements, e.g. 6 chicken breasts, cut into 2 inch cubes 2 eggs 2 cups breadcrumbs 12 cup olive oil 12 cup white wine 12 lemon, juice of 3 garlic cloves, chopped 1 teaspoon dried oregano 12 teaspoon dried parsley

jabo 6y ago
Uh oh! I hope I didn’t ruin anyone’s evening. Fixing it.
- jabo 6y ago
  Hmmm, I spot checked a couple of records and I do see the / in measurements: https://imgur.com/IhBMBBD https://imgur.com/IhBMBBD Could you give an example record that doesn't have the right measurements? I can then verify with the source dataset, to see if it's an indexing bug.
  - mrrsm 6y ago
    Shouldn't that be 1/2 of a green pepper and 1/4 cup blue cheese?
    - jabo 6y ago
      Hmm, I'd think so too. Looks like the source dataset [1] has it wrong :( This is how it shows up (CSV format): 2230984,Buffalo Chicken Pizza!,"[""1 (9 3/4 ounce) canswanson premium white chunk chicken breast in water, drained"", ""2 tablespoons butter, melted"", ""1 (10 ounce) packageprepared thin pizza crust (12-inch)"", ""12 of a green pepper, thinly sliced"", ""14 cup crumbled blue cheese""]","[""Heat the oven to 425F Stir the chicken, hot sauce and butter in a medium bowl."", ""Spread the chicken mixture on the pizza crust to within 1/2-inch of the edge."", ""Top with the pepper and cheese."", ""Bake for 10 minutes or until the chicken mixture is hot and bubbling.""]",www.food.com/recipe/buffalo-chicken-pizza-394731,Recipes1M,"[""chicken"", ""butter"", ""crust"", ""green pepper"", ""blue cheese""]" I'll see if I can open a PR with the fix. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156

ibudiallo 6y ago

Very fast and very nice. One thing that can be improved is the way the history is populated. Right now, every time a search is performed, a new entry is added to history. I was thinking how to spell Cauliflower as I was typing, now I have to press the back button for each character I typed. It will make more sense to only add a history entry when the input is blurred - onblur()

jabo 6y ago
Ah yes, good catch. I'll fix that history issue. Btw, the search backend has typo tolerance enabled. So you should be able to get away with typos as bad as "cliflowre" and still get the right results: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/?r%5Bquery%5D=cliflowre https://recipe-search.typesense.org/?r%5Bquery%5D=cliflowre

nelsonenzo 6y ago

chrome wouldn't load it without a valid ssl cert. I'm very interested in seeing this though. Direct message me if you want a bit of free help with the infra. in the meantime, is the recipe dataset open sourced and available somewhere, for other builders?

jabo 6y ago
Hmmm, I do see a valid cert on my end: https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc Could you show me a screenshot of what cert gets loaded for you? I did switch between infra providers in the last few hours. So I wonder if you're hitting the older infra due to stale DNS. I got the dataset from this other Show HN post from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156
- nelsonenzo 6y ago
  It's working for me now. I think my company's internet vpn was blocking it, bad on me. Thanks for the info and site. It's super cool!

netsharc 6y ago

As an SI unit user who's been looking up more recipes during lockdown, the whole cups, spoons, etc, units of measurements are really annoying. Some recipe sites have on the fly conversion, it would be nice to have here as well, but my first look didn't inspire much confidence that this site will go anywhere (Example search: pizza, top result: fruit pizza. Ohkayyy...)

jabo 6y ago
I unfortunately did not find a good field to sort by in the original dataset from earlier today [1]. So it's just sorted by text match relevance scores, and then the order that they appear in the dataset. I'm hoping they publish a popularity metric, which will fix the issues like the one you pointed out. Or, once I have sufficient data on popular searches from this site, I can append that metric to the dataset. Early stages, so please pardon the dust in the meantime! re: SI units, I hear you. There's definitely scope for improvement! :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156

royaltjames 6y ago

This rules! SO FAST Search 'vegan' and Colorful Guac displays Ingredients 2 large ripe avocados 1 lime juice 2 garlic cloves, Minced 13 cup choppled scallion 13 cup choped red bell pepper 14 12 ounces diced tomatoes with jalapenos 14 cup snipped fresh cilantro 2 tablespoons Braggs liquid aminos

alejohausner 6y ago
With all those scallions, and that massive amount of cilantro you won't be able to taste the avocado. This reads more like some sort of chutney. /s

mc32 6y ago

I’d love if this had a recommendation engine like punchfork[1] [had[2]] has. That said the search is nicer than Yummly so I’ll have to give it a try. [1]https://www.punchfork.com/ https://www.punchfork.com/ [2] Nice to see they are back to being independent after Pinterest bought them out sometime back.

bostonvaulter2 6y ago
Yeah the search could use some improvements. The firs result for "pizza" is "Fruit Cookie Pizza" which I think almost no-one searching for pizza will want.
- jabo 6y ago
  I unfortunately did not find a good field to sort by in the original dataset from earlier today [1]. So it's just sorted by text match relevance scores, and then the order that they appear in the dataset. I'm hoping they publish a popularity metric, which will fix the issues like the one you pointed out. Or, once I have sufficient data on popular searches from this site, I can append that metric to the dataset. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156

drfuchs 6y ago

How do I tell it I really want to search for just "harissa" and not "Harrison", "Harriet", "Harris", "harrissee", etc.? I tried putting it in quotes, but no such luck.

jabo 6y ago
This is not possible at the moment, but it's on my todo list.
ilovefood 6y ago
This was my first search too lol! I just love harissa :)

reificator 6y ago

Have you considered the ability to filter out recipes that don't contain a particular ingredient? Obvious use cases are food allergies and dislikes in general. My specific use case is that I searched `guacamole` and got 2k that contained `salt` but only 1.8k that contained `avocados`. I want to see the recipes that don't use avocados. EDIT: It appears that `avocados` and `avocado` are separate ingredients, as are `tomatoes` and `tomato`. I know pluralization rules are hard, particularly in English, but any chance of a cleanup pass for the... low hanging fruit?

jabo 6y ago
Ah interesting use case with food allergies and exclusions. Added this to my todo list. I see what you did there with low hanging fruit! I'll take a pass at de-duping plurals in ingredients. Good catch!
- js2 6y ago
  Not just allergies. I was just looking for biscotti recipes and there's basically two styles of biscotti: made with butter (the soft chewy kind) and made without (the crispy you'd better have a drink to dip it in kind). It's impossible to search for the latter without excluding butter.
dc443 6y ago
As an avocado fan I have trouble grappling with the concept of guac made without them. Isn't that sorta like orange juice made from things that are not oranges? Feels almost oxymoronic. Good suggestion though.
- reificator 6y ago
  When I say "I want to see the recipes without avocados" it's kind of like when you witness a car crash. You're not looking because you want to see someone crash, you're looking because it's horrifying. Same with avocado-less guacamole. The concept is horrifying so I need to know. And yes, I would absolutely love to see the recipes for orange juice that don't include any oranges for the same reason. Either way though, I think it's just because `avocado` and `avocados` are counted as different ingredients.

blorenz 6y ago

This is great! I thought that I could filter on ingredients with an intersection of those ingredients and instead got the union. I would love if this could toggle between those and possibly the exclusion as well.

jabo 6y ago
Added to my todo list, to toggle between AND / OR when filtering by ingredients.

lowdanie 6y ago

Very nice. One issue I noticed: I looked up Chana Masala and the first recipe (Vegan Chana Masala) calls for “12 tsp salt” but the source calls for “1/2 tsp salt” :)

jabo 6y ago
This is unfortunately an issue with the source dataset that I got from here[1]. I've now added a prominent warning to the UI, to check with the original site if the ingredient measurements seem off. Don't want any ruined dinners on my hands! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156

s1mon 6y ago

Very fast and interesting, but I couldn't figure out how to search for ingredients like lime leaf. If I search for "salmon lime leaf" in the title section, none of the top hits have lime leaf in them. If I search in the ingredients section, I get variations on limes (juice, zest, etc.) but no lime leaf. Curiously, if I just search for "lime leaf" in the title (without salmon) I get things that have lime leaf in them.

jabo 6y ago
The top bar only searches within recipe titles. So if a recipe title has those keywords, it will show up in the results. The best way to search for ingredients would be in the sidebar. In this particular example, the issue is that the source dataset [1] has "lime leaves" in plural, so if you click on "show more" in the sidebar after searching for "lime", you should see it in the list. I'm going to work on normalizing singular / plural ingredients as much as I can as part of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25368628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25368628 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156

atonse 6y ago

Seeing as this is likely an open source algolia, can this be used for searching logs?

jabo 6y ago
If it can fit in memory, yes. But TBH, logs are a unique beast in that searches are usually temporal and only a tiny portion of the dataset is typically queried. So it will be wasteful to store the entire index in memory 24x7, which is what Typesense (and Algolia) do. ElasticSearch on the other hand has mastered searching log datasets by storing the primary index on disk, so I'd recommend using ES for log data, instead of Algolia / Typesense. The tradeoff with ES is performance, since the ES index needs to be fetched from disk. For any other structured dataset (like the dataset in this app), Typesense would be a good fit.
- atonse 6y ago
  Thanks for that detailed answer. That really helped me understand the tradeoffs which in hindsight seem obvious :-) We currently use Algolia for 3 public sites and will further explore TypeSense for something like this for a site that hosts healthcare patient info. And will stick to our original plan of setting up elasticsearch for logs.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

I can't access the bag and it's stuck in a loop of "Warning Potential Security Risk" Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized. HTTP Strict Transport Security: false HTTP Public Key Pinning: false

jabo 6y ago
Hmmm, I do see a valid cert on my end: https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc https://imgur.com/a/xgYwGFc Could you show me a screenshot of what cert gets loaded for you? I did switch between infra providers earlier today. So I wonder if you're hitting the older infra due to stale DNS.

cpard 6y ago

It is amazing how fast the pages render. Amazing work, even if it took 6 instead of 1 hour!!

jabo 6y ago
Thank you!

rsfern 6y ago

Nice! Is there a way to get a link to a specific entry rather than just the full list of query results?

jabo 6y ago
If you click on the little icon on the bottom right of each search result card, that should take you to the source website from where the recipe is from.
- SamBam 6y ago
  Ah, it does, but I'd like to second the suggestion to put the domain name at the bottom. All the cards I looked at looked like they had room. First, it makes a big difference to me if it's from a site I know and trust. Second, I think that clear attribution is a good thing, even if you may be legally in the clear for copyright.

nojito 6y ago

Great idea and works quite well. However, it's generally frowned upon to show the actual directions for a recipe. Which is why you see most recipe aggregators only show ingredients and link directly to the source to get the actual directions

motyar 6y ago

Wow it's super fast. Someone please make this over web archive data, for web search.

jabo 6y ago
If you have a structured dataset, I can build an instant search experience around it!
GarlicToum 6y ago
I did that! Feel free to take a look at https://garlictoum.com https://garlictoum.com - it crawls recipe sites and indexes them while providing some nice filtering!

xs 6y ago

Wait a minute... What about copyright? Like I would love to have a blog where I can just copy and paste my favorite recipes, and add a few notes myself. But I don't do that because it seems like plagiarism. Or another option is to use this site, and then use some kind of 1-5 star rating. And then just see my favorites without all the other bs that food sites show you.

jabo 6y ago
I got the source dataset from this Show HN earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 Here's a comment thread that talks about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358813
yojo 6y ago
IANAL, but as I understand it the ingredient list is not copyright able, though the description may contain sufficient creative content to qualify. There’s even an FAQ covering it. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  From your linked page: > However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Emphasis mine. A website full of recipes certainly seems to be a collection in the sense protecting a cookbook.
kaetemi 6y ago
Copyrights apply to the literal text of a recipe, but not to a recipe itself. Recipes are not copyrightable last time I checked, just the literal text.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  A collection of recipes is copyrightable though. I think recipe vs collection of recipes is one of the canonical examples.

russellbeattie 6y ago

I'd make the title of the recipe the link to the summary, rather than the "Read Cooking Directions" text, which is sort of confusingly worded. Do you "cook" salad? Also, as others have said, you're going to get sued if the originator of the recipe isn't linked prominently.

abhinavsharma 6y ago

This is really good. I would love to integrate this as an extension into our mobile browser. Hope that’s ok. https://insightbrowser.com/collections/cooking https://insightbrowser.com/collections/cooking Also I wanted to mention that the most important piece of metadata we’ve learnt about that users care about after ingredients is the website it’s sourced from. It’d be great to have that

jabo 6y ago
I actually sourced the aggregate dataset from this other Show HN earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356156 I do include the source website in the search results. It's the little icon on the bottom right of the search result card and it's also linked from the modal that opens up if you click on "Read cooking directions".
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  Oh cool I think you may have just hit the API limit for favicons if you use one from the HN traffic https://share.icloud.com/photos/0XKxqxHuzZV-7sO2wOx0y53YQ https://share.icloud.com/photos/0XKxqxHuzZV-7sO2wOx0y53YQ
  - jabo 6y ago
    That's actually the icon I intended to show! :) It's an icon of a ticket that gets printed in restaurant kitchens.
    - abhinavsharma 6y ago
      I see, that’s cool but I was referencing something different — That it was important for users to quickly recognize the publisher on the search result page itself. They develop more trust with some sources than others. I wasn’t able to discern that. But if your goal is to showcase search capabilities to developers instead of a daily driver search engine it wouldn’t matter much.

rglover 6y ago

I've been looking for an Algolia-style alternative (in terms of result quality/fuzziness) and this is great. Definitely going to use this on a project soon.

Semaphor 6y ago

This looks great! A small bug: Filtering by ingredient "Sugar" gives results like "Sugar free" and "no-sugar-added". And a small UX request: Have the recipe not just be a JS modal, I want to be able to open them in a new tab.

isuckatcoding 6y ago
I don’t count that as bug but I see what you mean۔ The search engine only has so much context about the content.

kaetemi 6y ago

I'd be more interested if it could also automatically convert between voodoo and actual metric measurements.

d23 6y ago

This is awesome. If nothing else, the ability to view a recipe without having to scroll through a 10 page story about the first time the author saw an avocado makes it worth it.

baxtr 6y ago
Yeah true. I hate how simple recipe site have been bloated with a) trackers b) ads and c) long text to improve their SEO. Finding "just the recipe" has a great value for me nowadays.
smichel17 6y ago
Once upon a time, yummly was this

chrysoprace 6y ago

Really love this, but I do see that there are some formatting issues on some recipes. I found that when I was looking into recipe-scraping solutions there were only certain compatible sites since they were formatted so differently, and often they would have to make updates for sites that their their formatting. Impressive all the same! Keen to dive into the source and learning a bit.

ponker 6y ago

I searched for “cubeb” to find recipes which use this spice. It was changed to “cubed” with no way to revert.

blondin 6y ago

this is quite amazing and also inspiring! thanks for doing this and showcasing typesense.

captn3m0 6y ago

Suggestion: Add open search support, so browsers prompt me to add it as a search backend. I added it to Firefox with the "eat" keyword so typing "eat butter chicken" gets me straight to the results page.

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago

Very, very impressive. One small nitpick: The result ulrs don't behave like regular links. Can you open the recipe, preferably the original url, in a new tab when a middle click happens on a 'Read Cooking Directions' link?

jabo 6y ago
Yup, updated it!

haser_au 6y ago

@Jabo: Great site. Some errors though, for example the "4 Ingredient Sauce for Roasted Lamb" says to use 12 cups of brown sugar. The source site has 1/2 cup (0.5), so I'm guessing it's a scraping issue. Wouldn't want to give someone diabetes with their lamb!

haser_au 6y ago
Related Issue ticket https://github.com/Glorf/recipenlg/issues/3#issuecomment-742345537 https://github.com/Glorf/recipenlg/issues/3#issuecomment-742...

baxtr 6y ago

This is really great! I will use that going forward :) Two things to consider: a) put it onto a real domain. it's a great product, it deserves a domain :) b) make the links clickable. They have the same color as the links below and I tried to click them with no success.

jabo 6y ago
Any ideas for a domain name? You know what they say about naming things... :) Just made the links clickable!

speedupmate 6y ago

@Jabo although search is really great you instantly know the quality of recipes is "aggregated or marketing" junk when one recipe contains quantities in millilitres, mystical cups and a oven temp in unknown centigrade scale so heres a idea for you to automatically rate those things by just investigating unknowns and either help them to be converted to multiple centigrade scales, and single/multiple comparable metrics you've achieved the ultimate you are missing direct links to search results, to single search result and it's hell of a task to find a link to click that opens the little modal with recipe information (click on square should be enough)

mahesh_rm 6y ago
>> quantities in millilitres, mystical cups and a oven temp in unknown centigrade scale As somebody who likes to cook and has not the slightest idea of what Farnheits, Ozs, Yards, Feet, Gallons, are, nor anything about how Freedom Unit Related & Co. converts to simple decimal metric measures, you are speaking Klingon.
lopis 6y ago
Cups, spoons, etc, are convertible to millilitres. Most recipes call for pre-heated over at 180ºC unless states otherwise. Cooking does not observe reproducible builds. You always, always needs to taste, poke, look. If your flour is of a different type of grain or not as fine, if you use different varieties of vegetables, or if your kitchen is a few degrees warmer or cooler, you WILL get different results. So go ahead and use any mystical cup you want. Ingredient proportions are what matters. If you fail, write down what went wrong so you know better next time.
- someone7x 6y ago
  I've been cooking and programming for a long time now and wholeheartedly agree with everything you said except the default oven temp thing. Baking is a cargo cult of chemistry and I'd say most folks are well advised to follow those recipes exactly.

maddyboo 6y ago

This is cool! It seems like a great way to find recipes altered for special diets like vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, keto, etc.

vikin9 6y ago

Inability to open selected recipes in a new tab (e.g., to read later) is really annoying

ysoft 6y ago

My team used typesense for a recent project. 16 million records combined with https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/building-search-ui/what-is-instantsearch/react/ https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/building-search-ui/what-i.... Really fast and worth the investment. It doesn't have all the enterprise features of ES or Solr but for basic search features it's great.

karterk 6y ago
What features are you missing?

hpeinar 6y ago

It seems that the index has dropped. All searches are getting 503 as a result right now: "Not Ready".

kgdinesh 6y ago

The page doesn't load for me (Location: Chennai, India)

rodrigoalviani 6y ago

Is not working

tagawa 6y ago

Love the concept but please could you show the domain name of the source websites? I use that as a filter for quality and it's time-consuming hovering over the source icon to see the linked URL in the status bar for each recipe.

bulldog13 6y ago

This is really neat! My challenge with random recipes from the internet is they are all 4 or 5 stars, but sometimes they are kind of gross :/ Can anyone recommend a curated recipe list / website even if it is pay.

thamer 6y ago

Congrats! This is a great start. It's impressive how fast it is, even if this mostly says something about the state of the web today. 2M recipes is a huge database, and without any indication of the quality of a recipe this makes it really hard to tell which ones are worth trying. I hope you can add some sort of rating system in the future.