news.ycombinator.com• Feb 11, 2026• 1 min read
Show HN: I extract recipes from TikTok, Instagram, and the messy webI kept losing recipes. You know how it goes — you're scrolling TikTok at midnight, see an amazing pasta dish, save it, and never find it again. So I built TasteBuddy to fix that for myself. What I didn't expect: parsing recipes from the internet is a rabbit hole that goes deep.The thing is, recipe content is scattered everywhere in completely different formats. A food blog might have nice JSON-LD markup. A TikTok? Just someone talking over a video. An Instagram reel? Recipe buried in the comments. Pinterest? Links to blogs that died three years ago.So I ended up building specialized extractors for each platform.*Websites* are the "easy" case. I look for JSON-LD with `@type: Recipe` first — most food blogs have it, thanks to SEO plugins. But the real world is messy. I've seen duration fields as `PT30M`, `30 minutes`, `0:30`, and my personal favorite, just `half an hour`. About 30% of recipe URLs have no structured data at all, so I fall back to Gemini to make sense of the raw HTML.*TikT