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That is a pretty impressive bit of coding to be able to pull out the recipes, especially from more free form places like reddit.

I like the thinking about a one-time payment system, but the problem comes in that all your revenue would have to be from new sign ups.

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Thanks! Extracting info from the wild web is hard, and that's one of the reasons I did it -- because no one else was. Clojure + some basic machine learning made it feasible.

How processor intensive is the scrapping and machine learning? I guess how well do you think it could scale.

Scraping is as you might expect: it has to go fetch the page if it hasn't yet (URLs are only fetched once). One thing I can do to help here is pre-fetch/parse pages from popular sites. I'm already doing this for Food Network and Allrecipes.com.

The machine learning aspects aren't too bad. Most of the time is spent parsing the HTML DOM. I've done some micro-benchmarking but am very curious to see how it will handle under real load. I have a plan for moving from VPS (Linode) to AWS if necessary.

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