This new feature currently applies to: www.bigoven.com and BigOven for Windows

BigOven.com searches are now powered by our new StirFry™ search engine.  “StirFry” is our internal codename for our improved search engine.  For a while now we’ve been working on these improvements, which set the stage for more things to come. 

Our major goals for this release include speed – especially when applying multiple criteria to searches – and better surfacing of user’s comments in the results. 

StirFry now released on BigOven.com

We’ve just pushed the first of those updates to BigOven.com, and you can see the changes with a cool new feature:  see “Raves” related to your search query with a single click.

Example:

Let’s search for spinach recipes.  Simple.  Just visit www.bigoven.com and enter “spinach”. 

By default, you’re doing an “anywhere” search, which means BigOven will look for the term in the Title, Description, Ingredients, Tags, Cuisine, or Username of the recipe.  (We have deliberately removed Instructions from the anywhere search as of this release, because it was cluttering the search results with unrelated answers.  As just one example, if you were searching for “rolls”, you’d see all the recipes that required “rolling out the dough”.)

OK, back to spinach. 

You’ll get 4,700+ recipe results presented to you that look like this:

 

Take a look at the top two links – you can search just in the title, or – well lookee here! — you can search “recent raves related to spinach”:

 

In BigOven parlance, a “rave” is a rating of 4 or 5 stars.  Click on that, and you’ll see a paged list of all the raves that involved “spinach” in some way, sorted by most recent:

 

You can also use any username in the keyword search, which will show you all the recipes you’ve posted.  (If you have any private recipes, you must be logged in to see them.)

For instance, if your username is “stevemur”, you can see raves related to your recipes as follows – put your username in the “anywhere” box, and check the “Raves” box:

 

Have fun finding great dishes to try, and remember – raves are made much better if we take time to share our detailed comments and tips, so please keep contributing! 

Sorting

By popular request, we’ve also added the ability to sort by pure Star Rating, which is different than our default “Quality” sort order.  Here’s the difference:  "Star Rating” simply looks at the average star rating.  “Quality” is our term for our proprietary recipe scoring algorithm, which takes into account factors like how many reviews a recipe has, how many different people rated a recipe highly, whether a recipe has one or more photos, how many reviews there are, and more.

Put another way, a recipe with a single 5.0 star review will sort higher than a recipe with 25 4 star reviews, 30 comments.  But the latter recipe’s Quality will be much higher, and will sort higher in the Quality sort.

We hope you find these changes useful!

Happy cooking from Seattle