Punchfork

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

~ the obit ~

Jeff Miller was a Bay Area engineer who had done time as a hedge fund trader before deciding that recipe search on the internet was bad. He put twenty thousand dollars of his own money into fixing it and launched Punchfork in January 2011.

The idea was that a recipe's quality is already being measured, just not anywhere you could see it. Punchfork indexed a short list of publishers it trusted, Epicurious and Serious Eats among them, then watched how often each individual recipe was being shared on Twitter and on Facebook. StumbleUpon counted too. Each recipe got a score out of that activity, and the front page was simply whatever was scoring highest right now.

So it was never a recipe site. It was a scoreboard pointed at other people's recipe sites, and when you clicked through it sent you to the original publisher rather than keeping you. You could filter by diet, or tell it which ingredients were already in your kitchen and let it work backward to things you could cook tonight. The interface was fast and almost empty, which in 2011 made it stand out against competitors stacked with advertising.

None of this reached me. The food-blog economy Punchfork was built on top of was an English-language American thing, and in 2011 the Turkish internet got its recipes from television programs and from forums, not from a ranked index of Brooklyn food writers. I am reconstructing this one entirely from the record.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ pinterest's first acquisition ~

On 3 January 2013 Pinterest announced it had bought Punchfork. It was the first acquisition the company had ever made, which is a strange distinction for a two-year-old side project with one person on the masthead.

The announcement letter went up at punchfork.com/pinterest and said the quiet part immediately. Support would continue for a while, then the site would be retired along with everything attached to it, because a unified destination benefits users in the long run. The price was never disclosed. Miller joined Pinterest's engineering team, and a year and a half later Pinterest shipped a recipe search of its own.

~ the day the index stopped ~

The capture record dates the end without needing anyone's announcement. On 29 March 2013 punchfork.com was still serving a 6,817-byte homepage full of ranked recipes. On 2 April it was 1,585 bytes. The front page had been replaced by a single dialog box in a div the developer had named shutdown.

BuzzFeed had already written the obituary back in January, under a headline calling it the best recipe search engine on the internet and noting that it was about to disappear. The piece listed what Punchfork did that nobody else managed. It curated instead of indexing every home cook on earth, and it credited its sources prominently enough that you could judge a recipe before clicking, which also meant the traffic went back to whoever had done the cooking.

~ the box that let you take your likes home ~

The shutdown page did something most acquisitions do not bother with. Under the farewell text there was a plain input field with placeholder text reading "Your Punchfork username", and typing yours in gave you a permanent archive of every recipe you had ever liked.

Two years of saved dinners, handed back in a text box, on a site whose new owner had no reason to care whether you got them. Archive Team rescued the rest of it separately, so the index itself survives on archive.org. The food blogs it was ranking mostly did not.

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