Forum

MarciK - as always when wanting to reduce your search results, use the filters in the right hand column to make your results more precise. In this case you would select under Ingredient - Dairy / Cheese / Fresh cheese / Cream cheese. Now you are only seeing recipes containing cream cheese rather than recipes containing the words cream and cheese. These are the 8,660 online recipes using that filter.

If anyone would like help on using filters, Tutorial #3 is on that topic. You access the Tutorials from the green Need Help? button at bottom right (not available on phones). There is also a Help page on Search filters.

MarciK, separate from Jane's advice to use filters, I'm surprised that searching "cream cheese" in quotation marks didn't produce a set of suitable recipes that contain that exact phrase in the recipe titles, since that's how EYB searches display results: words/phrases in recipe titles first, followed by ingredients matching your search terms. And of course if "cream cheese" appears in the title, that ingredient would also be listed in the Ingredients field of the recipe.

MarciK, are you entering your search term within parentheses, or in quotation/speech marks? Make sure you use so-called double quotes -- "cake flour" -- instead of single quotes/apostrophes, as the latter don't work the same way in searching.

MarciK - I tested it on my own Bookshelf and it worked as expected - entering "cake flour" only showed recipes containing cake flour or recipes for how to make cake flour. The "how-to" recipes will appear at the top as recipes with the search words in the recipe title are considered to be the most relevant. Could it be that which is confusing you?

These are the results in the Library online recipes. These are the same results re-sorted to show the most recently published at the top.

So, I figured out why we are getting different results. Using quotation marks worked fine when I tried it on the computer. They do not work when I search from my iPhone. It must be something wrong in the mobile version then. I'm usually using this website from my phone though, so hopefully it can be something that can be looked into.

Funnily enough there is one recipe that results from a "chicken chocolate" search - Chicken-chocolate enchilladas.

I tested the search on my phone and you are correct - the Boolean "x y" is not doing an exact match for the words inside the " but showing matches for x AND y. I have passed this over to our developers to look into.

Even aside from equivalent ingredient names, I think EYB searches for other alternate terms in recipe titles too. Right? Is there any way to eliminate that and search only for the EXACT words? For example, I recently indexed a "recipe" on Cleaning the fish. I was just curious if there are a lot of similar recipes on EYB. So I searched on the word "cleaning," but I'm getting lots of recipes with just "clean" in the name. Mostly "clean-eating" and "eat-clean," but I just wanted to search the word "cleaning". Well, actually, I see many of the sort I was looking for that start out "How to clean mussels/crabs/fish/etc." But still I would like to know if there's a way to limit search results to just the exact words that I typed. I think there are some times when it would be helpful.

I'm having another searching problem. I know I should read the search help pages one of these days, because I just don't find EYB searching very intuitive. So I was just looking through one of my Scandinavian cookbooks and noticed that they have recipes for cooking whale meat. And I was curious how many other such recipes are already on EYB. First I just searched on "whale", which I knew would bring up a lot of other miscellany such as whale-shaped cookies and cakes and other irrelevant results, although interestingly the first two recipes that popped up (from The Nordic Cookbook) were actual whale recipes. Then I decided to just start again and filter first, and then keyword search. So I filtered all EYB recipes for just "Game", but when I then searched on "whale" within just that category I came up with zero results. If it's not under "Game," then what is it under? I also tried the same thing with "Fish & seafood" and "Other meats," and it still didn't work.

Wait a minute. I just tried it without filtering down so much. I simply checked off "Meat, poultry & game" and then typed "whale," and it looks like maybe those two recipes from The Nordic Cookbook are the only ones on EYB, as the rest of the results are all just recipes from a book with the word "Whale" in the title.

I guess I just wish that every ingredient in EYB was clickable. For me it would be much easier, most of the time, to just find a recipe with the same ingredient and then just click on it to see all other recipes in the database that specifically use that ingredient and not have to rely on keywords for searching (which will often pick up things that you're not really looking for).

If you ever aren't sure which filter is applied to an ingredient, enter the ingredient name in the search box then look to see which filter (in the category you would expect to find it) has the highest number next to it. Whale is categorized as Other meats, since a whale is not a fish. However my explanation on how to find the filter doesn't work very well in this case since there are only two recipes containing whale meat but in general that is the best way to do it.

Oh, I thought I had tried "Other meats" and not gotten any results, but I must have made a mistake. Yes, I see it works.