Food Genie, Recipe Search Algorithm Using Web Scraping

Coping up with our busy lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits, we are compelled to eat diet foods containing specific ingredients and recipes. It's not easy to ask the chef to make a range of recipes that contain the required ingredients. There are several recipe websites containing a wide range of recipes to choose from. This allows the chef to make new meals containing the specified calories and other nutritional values. The challenge is to find a list of all recipes containing the required ingredients along with the maximum calories allowed without having any data in-hand. This paper presents a method to get a list of all recipes along with its details like methods, ingredients, nutritional information which contains all or some of the mentioned ingredients. The method will allow users to search for recipes easily without worrying about the ingredients. Web scraping using Scrapy and Neo4j graph database is used to implement the algorithm. Web scraping takes the contents of a web page and saves them in a Neo4j graph database using the Python scrapy package. This database will be used to do more study on the food genie application in order to improve search results. Chefs may use the online app to prepare a variety of recipes using particular components to maintain a healthy lifestyle.