So, what’s this you ask? It’s a series of mini-hackathons some of us at Comperio are doing to achieve a small list of goals:

1. Learn more about search, both tech and UX.
2. Show that a nice search user experience doesn’t need a search input box.
3. Show a search that is light weight.
4. Generally, build something nice, quickly, to show off.

“But what is it?” you ask again. The second answer is that it’s a search application for recipes containing the most in-season vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, fish, shellfish, poultry and meat. So, a search without a search box giving you the recipes that will make you pick the freshest, most tasty food available at any given time of the year. In Norway, you can get strawberries the whole year around, but it’s only a month or two during the summer that they taste really good. and are cheap. This goes for a lot of different foods.

We’ll blog every step of the journey. First small hackathon is this Friday, January 7th. To test our ideas we’ve already crawled food recipes from Klikk.no, and transformed them into JSON-format by using Forage Document Processor from Fergus McDowell’s excellent Forage Search Engine.

Next step is to get an Amazon EC2-server up and running, install Elasticsearch, and feed it recipes in JSON-format. We’ll also make some rough mockups of how the user interface is going to be, and maybe, hopefully get a simple version of the Seasonal Food Recipe Web Application up and running. If we after a while get enough traffic, we’ll try to do some machine learning. And we’ll definitely test out different ways of doing relevancy tuning.

Sounds nice? This is work in progress, so check back every now and then for new blog posts.