

Ask HN: Review My WebApp - Recipe Puppy - Search recipes by ingredients and/or keyword - kbrower
http://www.recipepuppy.com/

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systemtrigger
I like how it prompted me to add more items to the filter which updated the
search results which seem to come from all over the culinary web. I can see
how this is already a useful service. Forgive my ignorance, Are you the first
mover in this space or are others already doing recipe search by ingredients?
I was a little frustrated with the search result display: I had to scroll down
a page or two of whitespace but I assume you'll work on that in good time. I'm
also feeling unloved by the way each search result appears because the list of
external links makes me feel like I'm on a parked site. My frustration was
that for every recipe I still needed to visit the grocery store to get more
ingredients - that said it may be because my cupboard is too bare. I wonder if
for the paid service it might work a bit better if you approached the whole
site from an ad-free perspective. What if the search results didn't drive away
traffic to the source sites but revealed the full recipes on your site? Only
your paying customers would get to see the entire recipe while freeloaders
could see just the list of ingredients? Or you could give away some recipes in
their entirety for free while making a percentage of the search results opaque
to all but your customers. If you're wanting to flip this maybe you could sell
or license to a foodie site. I don't know what restrictions the sites you're
getting these recipes from place on their APIs (which is I assume how you're
getting the data) but these are my initial thoughts based on a cursory visit.
Good v1, I think you should keep working on it. And don't listen to me too
much, you might well have an ad model that works.

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kbrower
thanks for your feedback, what is your screen resolution+browser?(you
shouldn't have to scroll down) there are existing players in this
space(supercook.com/recipematcher.com) My main motivation to create rp was my
frustration with these services. I am experimenting with a lot of ideas for
monetization. I am not sure it is legal to display the full recipe on the
site. The way the search works is that it sorts by the number of matching
ingredients and then by the number of ingredients in the recipe. I find that
adding ingredients to exclude helps narrow down the recipes to things I can
mostly make. You can also try out the account which lets you limit the max #
of ingredients in the search results.

~~~
systemtrigger
My screen res is 1440x900 and my browser is Safari 4 public beta. If it isn't
legal to display the full recipes on your site I wonder if you could around
that by doing a split-pane thing - with your content on one side and the
source content on the other, that's cheating a bit but not nearly as much as
if you scraped everything as your own. I wonder if there are any free-use
recipe databases you could use. Smart design on the search - you might want to
highlight this on the front page as your sorting algorithm inspires confidence
in the search results. Good luck!

~~~
kbrower
I am going to stay away from framing content, but I set the recipes to open in
new tabs and added the sorting description to the front page. Thanks!

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vaksel
you should probably pick a cuter dog(golden retriever or something) + one that
at least looks happy/excited.

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kbrower
to try out the account features username:what password:what

