Inspiration
I've been wanting a recipe API that gave me the power for complex searches, and that wasn't very expensive. Sadly, I couldn't find any that suited what I needed, so I was forced to build one myself. My initial goal was to search for recipes that had (or didn't have) certain ingredients.
How it works
In the end, I've had to build a search engine for recipes. I crawled and indexed multiple recipe websites, and used that indexing to have data to search against. You can currently search by ingredient, or do a full text search in the directions.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge was, and still is, cleaning crawled data for ingredients. Determining what the ingredient is, the amount and unit of said ingredient can be a very challenging task from any given recipe. I can certainly understand why most recipe websites don't have an ingredient search, and by no means do I claim that I've completely solved the problem. I've made a start, but there still is a lot more work to be done in this area.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Although not complete, I'm proud to have built a recipe search engine that searches by ingredients. I don't believe that there really is anything like it, and I'm excited to continue adding on to it.
What I learned
This was my first exercise building a search engine, from crawing to building databases for the indexed data, to cleaning up data to put in a useful format. This is also my first time using Docker, which is a cool piece of technology.
What's next for Recipe Database
Improve ingredient extraction, and retreive recipes based on when they are eaten (breakfast, appitizer and so on.)
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