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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: - "bo

by abeppu 5y 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 5y ago
Agreed. Adding two common things also gives you 0 results (e.g. beef and rice).
hunter2_ 5y 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?!
rcoveson 5y 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.
- rcoveson 5y 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.

by abeppu 5y ago

mritchie712 5y ago

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

hunter2_ 5y 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?!

rcoveson 5y 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.

rcoveson 5y 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.