Welcome to Feed Me That!

For the technically minded:

The technology we use to find what you're looking for is a bucket hash index developed by me. We index about 350,000 references of 30,000 unique terms. That's an average of about five references per target. Finding search terms in the 80 MB text of our recipe collection took only milliseconds on the 50 Mhz Pentium this site started with. Building the index takes about ten seconds on the equipment we currently use. It scales elegantly to terabytes of indexed data and billions of search terms. It is possible to use parallel computing methods to scale this to the size of a major search engine if I cared to, but I don't. Because we index only whole words, case insensitive, and only titles and categories, and because of the structure of our documents the index is about 7% the size of the indexed text. I could make indexes for a fulltext search, and I might if I have time.

The indexer is written in C++, specifically gpp, which is one of the dozens of languages that came for free with linux, and one of the hundreds that are available for free with linux.

The lookup and display are done in PHP, which came for free with linux.

The webserver software is Apache, which came for free with linux. (noting a trend here?) I could have written the software in ASP, and run IIS as the webserver -- I've done work like that for customers that required it. For my own site, however, I know better.

The server runs on linux operating systems. We've tried dozens of them and for our purposes they all work fine. Some of them we've paid for, and some of them were free.

The service is now hosted at Bluehost.

At one point we were serving over one million hits per month on that old P50 - about 10% of it humans and the rest bots.

I edit all of the source code with gedit, which is the linux equivalent of Windows' notepad. gedit has many useful features that notepad lacks like tabbed documents, context highlighting, line numbering, and plugins. Like many thousands of wonderful and free things about linux, if you only run Windows, you can't have it.

The source code is not available because I don't have the time, resources or desire to do an exhaustive patent search.

Hackers attempt to break into and seize control of the webserver an average of four times a day that I know of, mostly using automatic vulnerability bots. As far as I can tell they've always failed. If you're one of them and you want to give it a shot without going to prison, you have my permission to change this text to your handle: "pthhhh". Please don't be vulgar -- this is a family site.