
DuckDuckGo adds zero-click recipe search with the Punchfork Recipe API - jeffmiller
http://blog.punchfork.com/2011/07/05/announcing-the-punchfork-recipe-api-and-a-search-partnership-with-duckduckgo/
======
DanielBMarkham
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
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 ;)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
nopassrecover
Domain renewal is something like $140 per year !?

I hope you mean web hosting.

//edit: Ah you mean for the .com + .org + .net etc. Still can't see this being
140 but makes more sense

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po
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.

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Newky
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)

~~~
asymmetric
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>

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planb
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?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
We have <http://ddg.gg/>

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

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

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

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

~~~
asymmetric
who's jeff by the way?

~~~
jeffmiller
me

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ry0ohki
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.

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

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rgrieselhuber
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.

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cl8ton
I wish I had your UI skills Jeff!... Been using PF for a while now and it's
great.

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dlikhten
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.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
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.

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

~~~
epi0Bauqu
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.

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

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

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

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jason_tko
Congrats Jeff, this looks awesome.

