Yummly.

Friends, readers, fellow foodies... Lend me your ear.  I've just spent the last few hours exploring the depths of this amazing website-  Yummly.  Words cannot express my excitement.  With the promise of being able to "search every recipe in the world", how can one NOT be thrilled?  They had me at hello, but once I began to navigate my way around the incredibly user-friendly database, I was absolutely hooked.  So simple!  Enter ingredients, keywords, food hopes/wishes/dreams and *boop* tons of recipes appear right before your eyes.  Save and organize your favorite recipes, get reccomendations on the food you love, share your findings with friends- you can even find nutrition facts, allergy related info and dietary guidelines for every dish you make.  A serious database for seriously devoted food lovers.  Check out their recent press release:   

*Yummly Serves Up the Ultimate Kitchen Tool*

Powerful New Site Redesign Delivers Cutting-Edge User Experience and Technology

PALO ALTO, CA – October 10, 2012 – Yummly, the leading digital kitchen and recipe search platform, today announced the launch of their redesigned website for their over 7.5 million unique visitors. Announced in conjunction with Yummly’s new revolutionary native advertising platform, Yummly Advertising, the new Yummly unveils a fresh design that delivers an easy, beautiful and innovative experience for the more than 183M cooking enthusiasts in America today.

“The evolution of Yummly boils down to one simple ingredient – the user. The Yummly redesign sets the stage for the continued expansion and evolution of the Yummly digital kitchen platform to become an invaluable online resource for foodies and cooks of all skill levels,” says David Feller. “With over 7.5 million visitors to the site, the new and improved Yummly delivers on this core vision to provide an intuitive, visually-rich tool for each person to discover the recipes they love and enjoy based on their taste preferences.”

Recipes Redesigned: Yummly’s New Take on Cooking

Launched in April of 2010 by cofounders David Feller and Vadim Geshel, Yummly’s food and recipe platform understands recipes from across the Internet and match them with its users' tastes.

Designed with simplicity and usability in mind, the new Yummly redesign mixes a scoop of high tech and a healthy dash of user feedback to provide a vastly improved user experience. The company will also be rolling out additional features and enhancements to the site over the next few weeks.

New features of the Yummly Ultimate Kitchen Tool include:

· New Branding: Created to evoke the true essence of Yummly, the new Yummly logo reminds users to just say “Yum” as they peruse the best recipes from notable cookbooks, bloggers and food sites from across the web.

· A Remodeled Digital Kitchen: The new and improved Yummly features a fresh, dynamic visual interface for food lovers everywhere. Seasoned chefs and novice cooks can customize their searches, based off their tastes and dietary needs, paving the way for the ultimate personalized recipe collection.

· Yummly Ratings: Incorporating ratings and reviews from a variety of sources across the web – including popular food sites, social media channels and from within the Yummly community – Yummly’s standardized recipe ratings system analyzes user feedback, source reputation and social media impact of the recipe to provide the most comprehensive assessment of a recipe’s quality.

· The Yum Button & Social Integration: As part of their individual settings, users can utilize the pervasive Yum button to share their discoveries and favorite recipes on Facebook. Simply “Yum” a recipe and that endorsement will seamlessly appear as an update on the user’s Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed through Facebook Open Graph.

· Enhanced Imagery: Care to see what’s cooking? The new Yummly interface understands that sight is as important a sense as taste when it comes to meal preparation, offering over 100,000 new vivid, mouthwatering photographs from various recipe source sites to spotlight the visual experience of cooking and eating.

· More Cooks In the Kitchen: Yummly is adding additional recipe sources, so food lovers can do one universal search to find their perfect recipe versus visiting multiple sites. With our exclusive Yummly rating, deciding which recipe will be easier than ever.

· Yummly Advertising: Yummly Advertising’s native online advertising platform features integrated, contextual and useful ad placement within recipe search results, providing the Yummly cooking community with comprehensive brand suggestions.

· What’s on the Menu at Yummly? Yummly’s approach to 2013 will take the user out of the kitchen and into the market. Whether it’s the supermarket, farmers’ market or specialty market, Yummly’s multi-layered mobile strategy will enable users to efficiently shop and plan for their meals.

Yummly’s Digital Kitchen Platform: The Key Ingredients

Yummly offers a growing database of over 500k recipes, aggregated from leading recipe sites, cookbooks and advanced partnerships from leading food and beverage brands – all of which are searchable by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources. Yummly’s semantic search capabilities improve recipe search accuracy over other recipe sites by understanding a user's food intent and contextual meaning, ultimately generating more relevant results.

With an active community of over 7.5M users and counting, the adjustment and analysis of these recipe parameters to suit individual needs can generate large sets of personalized search data in real-time. To accommodate this continuous growth of data, and to harness insights from it, Yummly’s digital food platform underwent notable foundational changes, with the majority of the technology stack built using open source software.

Yummly’s new architecture features the following new technologies:

· Web-services: The Yummly development team constructed the new site by utilizing Yummly’s publicly available APIs. Taking full advantage of these web services, Yummly engineers plan to serve as an influence to and collaborate with other third party developers.

· Node.js. Infrastructure: The Yummly development team leveraged Node.js to develop both the front and back-end codebase. Blurring the distinction between the two codebases, this strategy leveraged skill sets between the two codebase areas and maximized the entire engineering team, resulting in a faster development cycle.

· Faster Search: The Yummly team also invested time and resources in their search infrastructure, improving search performance 5x.

“Yummly has leveraged open source software and advanced algorithms to deliver unprecedented sophistication and understanding of food data to help food lovers efficiently and precisely find great recipes," said Vadim Geshel, CTO of Yummly. "The incorporation of Node.js code into Yummly's infrastructure, among other open source systems and databases, maximizes both site productivity and search performance.”

About Yummly

Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press. Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visit www.yummly.com.
Connect with Yummly:
Read the Yummly Nibbles & Bits blog: http://www.yummly.com/blog/

Visit Yummly on Facebook: www.facebook.com/yummly
Follow Yummly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yummly

Have fun exploring!
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