Dietary preference toggle for recipes lens (such as vegan)

AshleyKolodziej

I would love to be able to adjust the recipes lens to only show vegan recipes. I tried making my own recipe lens using the keywords vegan, plant-based - but I am still getting non-vegan recipes back in my results when I search for a pumpkin pie recipe. Unfortunately, exclude keywords doesn’t work well for my use case, since keywords like “milk” or “egg” are often used in vegan recipes as “almond milk” or “flax egg”. However, when I asked the AI about the first result I got back and if it was vegan, it correctly answered that it wasn’t. I would be happy to trade a bit of speed/performance to have an AI-powered filter on something like recipes so that if “vegan” or “plant-based” isn’t on the page, there’s an extra quick check to figure out if the result is actually vegan by the ingredients listed. This would be a huge improvement in my ability to find recipes that work for me!

As a user, I would like to be able to toggle on a “vegan” option in the recipes lens settings so that I do not have to manually check if recipes are vegan when I’m going through search results. It would be awesome if this kind of setting could also be implemented for other dietary restrictions, preferences, or allergies -but vegan is the one I’m rooting for.

I don’t know of any browser or search engine that implements this feature.

carl

I think you would have better luck with specialized vegan recipe sites than with a search engine. If there's a vegan toggle, people will also want toggles for their allergies, sub-allergies, vegetarianism, pescatarian, LCHF diet, etc.

I think only manually curated recipe resources could handle such distinctions, and after all we have thousands of years of perfecting cooking and recipes.

jonathan-s

I think this is an excellent idea. Perhaps this feature could open up for some human curation, where human users have the possibility of labeling either recipes and/or websites.

After all, as a user I would like to search on a variety of websites to get the most interesting recipes, not pick ONE vegan recipe website and search for recipes there.

Vlad

Perhaps this feature could open up for some human curation, where human users have the possibility of labeling either recipes and/or websites.

Can you expand more on this idea?

jonathan-s

Vlad
For instance as part of the extension you could make it possible to add labels for the current website. These labels (and the human curation from it) could then be used to enhance search in different ways.

Of course this would also need to be double-checked. So you could possibly take inspiration from Stack Overflows review system there, or how reviews work at wikipedia.

carl

jonathan-s

What are the current collections of recipes or recipe sites that allow for human curation or crowdsourcing with these kind of labels? This sounds like a massive project and maybe not fit for a search engine per se. Just for milk there are several different kinds of allergies.

If Kagi goes forward with this idea, I think they could make it a general crowd-sourced tagging/labelling system from the start.

AshleyKolodziej

carl It looks like Yummly might have a framework for this. I’m not super familiar with how it works, but new recipes seem to be added to their database by being added to a recipe box by a user. Their vegan results page looks like this and also cross-references dietary restrictions: https://www.yummly.com/diets/vegan

After a recipe is added, some sort of magic happens that gets everything tagged correctly and doesn’t rely on the word “vegan” alone for a dish to show up in the vegan section. For example, it correctly picks up this vegetarian chili, even though there is no mention of “vegan” in the dish: https://www.yummly.com/recipe/Crock-Pot-Vegetarian-Chili-_Slow-Cooker_-9062357#a28cd768-9573-4aa0-b9c9-7d16fabb9b94

I’m not a fan of the way they take the recipe away from the source content, especially since I don’t use Yummly as a recipe manager (I prefer Paprika, which works well with regular web pages). It’s also going to only have the recipes people have already added, which limits the results coming back. Maybe there’s a way to bring their model to Kagi’s more extensive indexing?

AshleyKolodziej

If it’s possible to tell at the ingredients level what’s going on, it could also be phrased as “do not show any recipes with any of (long list of ingredients)”. From there, maybe there could be some pre-built lists for common diets or allergens, or you can create your own based on your knowledge of what you can’t eat or specific things you need to avoid. Maybe an AI feature could be to help generate these initial lists for the user to review. That still leaves egg and milk as challenges, but maybe there’s a way to tell what egg (alone, all by itself) is vs. flax egg is from Kagi’s side?