Cooking up a new search system: Inside recipe search at Cookpad

Cookpad’s recipe search helps cooks everywhere find tasty dishes to cook within an ever-growing catalogue of six million recipes created by everyday cooks. As a global recipe search with over 40m monthly users – optimising search quality is a critical and challenging task. Over the course of 2 years, the team embarked on a technological and cultural transition, with the aim of giving engineers greater ownership of the search experience. This included a shift to a Python-based stack and a data-driven approach to experimentation. This talk will give a brief intro to search relevance, and cover Cookpad Global’s search journey, along with the trials, tribulations, and successes along the way.