Info 202 Fall 2011

Not quite from a mainstream news
source, but I recently came across a fun webapp on reddit called www.recipelabs.com . While I consider it far from a proper product, it employs some
really interesting techniques for organization and retrieval.

If you look at the guided recipe
creation tool (www.recipelabs.com/add),
it blends the line between organization and retrieval. The moment I begin
typing a dish name into the field “What is the dish?”,  the app begins a search for similar recipes
across cooking websites. It then parses the recipes to return results such as
commonly found ingredients and nutritional value. There’s a duality of
retrieval and organization; Because the search is integrated into the
organizational tool, I get confused as to whether I should be making my own
unique recipe or if I should be trying to discover someone else’s.

This brings up another point where
I’m not sure if I can even trust the recipe that I am supposedly creating. By
aggregating and somehow magically generating ingredient proportions, how can I
even be certain that it is right? There’s a lot more at stake than just
information; I don’t want to waste time making and sharing a recipe that no one
has tested. While I think the tool is pretty clever, I’m just not entirely sure
it’s fulfilling its intended use case.

On a side note, I think it’s also interesting to point out
lifehacker.com’s recent post about the five best recipe organization tools:

http://lifehacker.com/5862746/five-best-recipe-organization-tools

It seems lifehacker users tend to favor freeform tools for
recipe management instead of any of the specific recipe websites available.