We're still working hard to bring the site up to the standards our users expect and are constantly working on improvements behind the scenes. Listed below are the details on some you may or may not have noticed. We appreciate your feedback on what we've done right or wrong.

-- The RecipeSource Team

November 2006
Users of newer browsers (such as Firefox or Internet Explorer 7) will notice the left menu bar now has pop-up menus for faster navigation to the subcategory you're looking for. We've been making other tweaks to improve the layout of the site as well. Let us know what you think!
January 2006
We've started moving the site to a new provider with a much faster computer which can hopefully handle our load much better than the computer we've been using since 2001. We're hoping this allows us to move forward with the site improvements we wanted to do, but just couldn't make happen on the old machine which often got overloaded with just the basic services we were already providing (especially around the holidays).
December 2005
We've finally moved our site design to using CSS style sheets. If anyone is still using really old browsers like Netscape 3 or IE 3, this may cause the site to look a bit worse, but everyone on recent browsers should notice only a little change (improvements we hope).
November 2003
We've been getting swamped as people come to us for help preparing for Thanksgiving dinner. In order to deal with the load better, we've switched to the Google search as our main search engine for now. (Update: This has been changed to only send searches to google when our site is too busy to handle them.)
July 2, 2003
While we haven't updated the news page in a long time, we continue to work on the site, as you may have noticed when various categories are cleaned up, and duplicate recipes removed. Unfortunately, life has a way of getting in the way of the best-laid plans, and work on our custom search engine has taken longer than we expected. Fortunately, the wonderful Google search engine has indexed our site and allowed us to make available their search engine for people who want to search for words in recipes other than their names. This is now available on our Advanced Search page.
July 31, 2001
Because many people complained we were returning too many results from our searches, we've changed the default from returning all recipes that match any of the words to returning those matching all of the words in a search query. You can still choose to search for any of the words if you can't find what you're looking for in the smaller set of results.
July 2001
By popular demand of users who prefer the old SOAR front page, the “site map” has now been moved to the front page. (Even with the category list on the left and the sitemap link at the bottom of it, we got countless e-mails from people who found it harder to browse the site.)
June 2001
One of the most requested “missing” features of the search engine, limiting a search to a certain category, is implemented in the new search engine. This leaves “search by ingredient” as our top priority in enhancing our new search engine.
May 2001
A “site map” link has been added to allow users who prefer the complete list of categories on a single page to browse the same way they did on the old SOAR site.
April 2001
A link is added to each recipe to a “plain text version of this recipe” to make it easier for users to save recipes & print them without the site borders.
March 2001
The SOAR collection is moved to a newer computer, new search engine, and new URL at RecipeSource.COM. Access times & searches are much faster, and the “Sorry our site is overloaded message” that plagued the old SOAR search engine is banished to the past. Unfortunately, the new site comes with new bills to pay - we're no longer getting our network connection for free, and we have to pay for computer upgrades to support the site, so we'll also be adding features to the site to help make it pay for itself. The first of these is the Amazon.com Honor System box you see to the left, where you can send us money to show your thanks for the site. (We're not going to stop providing service to people who don't send us money.) You'll also find links to Related Books in many categories that will let you order books from Amazon.com, who in turn will send us a share of your purchase via their affiliate program
1995-2001
SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes grows from its humble beginnings to over 70,000 recipes, accessed millions of times by users around the world. Unfortunately, the popularity overwhelms a succession of server upgrades and pushes to the limit of the network bandwidth available. (See the About Us page for more information about our history.)

Still to come:

  • Search by ingredient, keyword and other things than just by title
  • Better search resolution (fewer unwanted results)