How it works
ChefPodium does not make up ratings and does not copy recipes. Here is, plainly, how it works.
1. How we find recipes
Every major cooking website publishes the list of its own recipes so that search engines can find them. We keep more than 600,000 of those addresses, from about thirty websites in six languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese): Marmiton, CuisineAZ, Food.com, Kochbar, Tudo Gostoso, GialloZafferano, Recipe Tin Eats and others. When you type a dish, we look in those lists for recipes that have it in their name.
You can search in your own language: a built-in cooking dictionary links “chicken”, “poulet”, “pollo” or “Hähnchen”, so the same dish is found in every language. A typo is corrected automatically.
2. How we read the ratings
Our own program opens each page and reads the data the website publishes itself (the average rating and the number of reviews). That way, a number shown here is the one from the original website, not an estimate.
ChefPodiumBot. It reads each website's robots.txt file and follows its rules, opens at most two pages at a time per website, with a pause between each. If it is refused or the website does not answer, the page is skipped.
3. How we rank
A recipe rated 5/5 by 3 people is not necessarily better than one rated 4.6/5 by 2,000 people. So we pull each rating toward the overall average when there are few reviews:
adjusted rating = (reviews ÷ (reviews + 50)) × rating + (50 ÷ (reviews + 50)) × 4.2
The more reviews, the more the displayed rating counts. With 3 reviews, the adjusted rating of a 5/5 is about 4.2. With 2,000 reviews, a 4.6/5 stays at 4.6. Recipes whose title contains the words you typed come before the others, and recipes in your language come first. You can also sort by best raw rating, number of reviews or preparation time, and filter by language.
4. When you open a recipe
Our program reads the recipe on the original website and automatically rewrites it in other words, in your language: same ingredients, same quantities, same cooking times, reworded steps. It is shown here, and the source is always credited at the bottom: the website, its rating, its number of reviews, and a link to the original recipe. The rating shown is the original recipe's, not a ChefPodium rating.
The rewriting is automatic: check quantities, cooking times and allergens before you start. The results list itself only shows the title, thumbnail, rating, number of reviews, duration and a link.
5. Limits
- Partial coverage. For a very common dish, thousands of recipes exist: we read a few pages per website (the simplest names and the oldest recipes, which usually have the most reviews), not all of them. A search usually returns 100 to 180 recipes from 25 to 31 websites. Some websites do not publish their recipe list or block automated programs: they do not appear.
- Ratings are not perfectly comparable. Each website collects reviews in its own way.
- Websites change. A rating or a page may have changed since we read it. Lists are refreshed every week and results are kept for 24 hours.