Foodily

» see foodily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I have never once searched for a recipe on a social network, which puts me outside Foodily's audience by the widest possible margin, and the company would probably have told you that was the point. Foodily was built for the person who has already found four hundred lasagna recipes and cannot tell which one is any good. Its answer was to stop ranking by relevance and start ranking by who you know.

It launched as a web service on 1 February 2011, built by Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell, both out of Yahoo, with five million dollars from Index Ventures behind them. The crawler indexed recipes from food blogs and publisher sites rather than hosting its own, so the search half was a straightforward vertical search engine. The social half was the bet. Connect Facebook and every result carried the faces of friends who had saved or cooked it, and a Facebook app in August 2011 pushed that the other way, into the feed.

It worked well enough to win the 2012 Webby for best food and beverage site, which in that era meant something. An iPhone app landed in November 2011. Then Pinterest happened to the entire category. Recipe sharing on Pinterest exploded, and Foodily's distinctive feature, "here is what your friends cook", turned out to be a thing Pinterest did incidentally while doing everything else.

~ the record ~

~ the graph over the recipes ~

The technical work was in the matching. A recipe on one blog and the same recipe on another are not the same document, and Foodily had to decide they were the same dish before it could tell you three of your friends had made it. That is a deduplication problem dressed as a social feature, and it is the reason the company had engineers rather than editors.

The revamp in 2012 leaned further in, adding menus you could assemble and share, which was an attempt to become a place people came back to rather than a place a search dropped them into. It did not take. Search traffic is a hard habit to convert into a destination habit, and food was the category where Pinterest was busy proving it could be done a different way.

~ bought for the engineers ~

On 1 May 2015 IAC's Ask.fm acquired Foodily. The wording in the announcement was careful and everyone read it correctly: nine people from engineering and design were moving over to work on Ask.fm's question-and-answer platform, and the Foodily website and app would be "maintained by a separate division within IAC". That is the standard sentence for a product that has been placed in a room and had the door shut on it.

Ask.fm at that moment was IAC's problem child, a teen Q&A site with a serious safety reputation and a serious traffic base, and it needed grown-up engineers more than IAC needed another recipe vertical. So the Foodily team went to work on a service with almost nothing in common with the one they had built, and the recipe network kept running on maintenance for another two and a half years with nobody's name on it.

~ the unavailable notice ~

The archive dates the end fairly tightly. On 27 December 2017 foodily.com was still serving its normal fourteen-kilobyte homepage under the tagline "Find recipes online. Share them with your friends." On 9 January 2018 the same URL answered with a 302 marked Service Unavailable, redirecting to a page at blog.foodily.com whose path was simply /unavailable/. That notice is what Wikipedia describes to this day, because nobody ever replaced it with anything.

The domain outlived the notice. By 2024 foodily.com was redirecting to Ask.com, IAC's other inheritance, which is where a curl request still lands today. Seven years of crawling the food web and a Webby along the way, and the address now forwards to a search engine that stopped mattering a decade before Foodily launched.

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