Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A food guide that ignores Google and Yelp ratings
My partner and I (ex-Googlers) plan our trips around food as a way to connect with local culture. Before every trip, we'd spend hours digging through Reddit threads and local blogs, filtering out sponsored noise to find places worth eating. So we built CuriousSpoon, a food guide we could actually trust. *Why ratings fail* - 51% of negative reviews cite service, only 31% cite food [1] - Google removed 170M fake reviews in 2023; Harvard found 16% are suspicious [2] *What we built instead* An engine that does what a local food nerd does: reads city newspapers, local critics, subreddits, chef…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
I created this chrome extension for myself where I track my own behavior locally and recommend myself content from platforms I want content from (youtube/twitter/quora/etc) in a feed. I made it public just in case anyone else was interested. I would rather have control over my own algorithm and own the data. Also, it gives me flexibility. Turns out I do like these feeds just not when I don't own it haha. Let me know what you think of my implementation?
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Street food, existential questions on the nature of snacks
2016 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Browser Buddy▲156Hey HN, thank you for being a part of the internet we love. We’re Arnav, Mo, Jeremy and we’re building an “Internet for-you page” that recommends blogs and essays based on your interests. Try it here (https://www.browserbuddy.com/)! We love to discover and learn from personal blogs, essays, and articles on the internet. But despite exciting advancements in language modeling, it’s felt harder to discover interesting links from real people. We believe there is untapped potential to use these language models as “curators” rather than “creators”. To explore this, we’re building a…
Dec 2025 · browserbuddy.com · its alternatives →
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- 5
Take a photo and instantly determine if it's healthy or not
2021 · testflight.apple.com · its alternatives →
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- 8IW
Hey HN! I built this over the weekend. It is basically an extremely rudimentary crowd sourced recommendation system for anything in any city. I know that I could easily look this information up on Yelp but I thought it might be nicer to simply look up something like "the best steak in new york" and get that information. The database is almost empty but if you look up the "best coffee in ann arbor" you'll get a result which I seeded. Go ahead and contribute what you can. Ill be adding CAPTCHAs soon to prevent spammers. Here is the link: http://www.krowd.me
2011 · krowd.me · its alternatives →
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- 10IM
Hi HN ! I made a web app to check if an item on the menu is potentially spicy ? Problem: I recently arrived in Korea, and I quickly realized that if my girlfriend is not with me, I don't know what would try to kill my tastebuds. I could ask, but I'm shy and my broken korean wouldn't help much. And trying to find an answer online is time consuming, navigating between 10 paragraphs blogs. Solution: So i made this simple gpt wrapper that takes in a dish name in any language, and gives you a clear answer right away. Keep in mind that this is my first app and an mvp, to validate the idea. But I'm…
2023 · dieornot.com · its alternatives →
- 11AI
2015 · newforkermap.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I created a rating benchmark for restaurants and hotels in each state of the US scanning over 3 million reviews from Google. You can see 2 geo charts with the states with the best food and the best accommodation
2024 · feedcheck.co · its alternatives →
- 13
Find and share the best restaurants and bars in San Francisco recommended by people you trust. Create lists of your favorite restaurants to share and see the places other foodies think are the best. Get restaurant and bar photos, reviews, hours and more!
2014 · yumhacker.com · its alternatives →
- 14LF
If you guys are interested in high-quality food products please let me know what you think of my website prototype. 1)Do you understand immediately what the site is about? 2)Is it easy enough to understand how it works? 3)If ready to roll in your neighborhood would you be interested in subscribing to a service like this? I am in the process of getting a closed-beta off the ground in Brooklyn and I am really interested in all kinds of feedback about the idea, the design, UX. Thanks. http://www.the-local-kitchen.com
2012 · the-local-kitchen.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Jello SEO▲11I was watching Deep Research do hours of research in minutes and thought why the hell am I still manually clicking through Ahrefs trying to guess what keywords to check? So I built an AI that does keyword research the same way. The problem with traditional keyword tools is they assume you already know what to look for. But I'd sit there thinking "okay I'm building a developer tool... do I search for 'API monitoring'? 'webhook debugging'? 'API testing'?" Then I'd spend an hour going down rabbit holes and miss the fact that "Postman alternative open source" or something like that gets 2k…
2025 · jelloseo.com · its alternatives →
- 16AS
Hi guys, Lately, I’ve noticed myself searching for things in Google and then typing Reddit (e.g. “opinion on Liz Truss reddit.”) I tried to work out why I was doing this, initially thinking that I just wanted to enjoy the social aspect of the internet, but now I think I do it because, sometimes, I want to see results which have been filtered down by people, not by the Google search algorithm. One of the many examples of where I think this can be useful is when searching for products or services. I know that if I Google “best laptop for gaming,” the results will be the products of large…
2022 · crowdsearch.xyz · its alternatives →
- 17IB
I love culture + travel, and one of my favorite pastimes is dropping into random streets on Google Street View. I just LOVE getting a tiny snippet into how people live, the architecture, and discovering hidden corners of places I'll probably never visit. I'm kinda weird like that. When AI came along, I started asking it to explain what I was looking at - and I learned a ton. I couldn't stop using this combo. So I built Streetwhip. It's kinda like reverse Geoguessr - instead of guessing where you are, you get educated about places as if you had a smart local guide with you. What used to be…
2025 · streetwhip.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Find restaurants from friends you trust — not random reviews
May 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi hn! It has always annoyed me that recipe websites are so cluttered and have so much (in my opinion) useless fluff, so I made a little website to solve that problem! One good thing about SEO for once is that Google has pretty much forced the internet to adopt JSON-LD for recipes so many recipes are directly extractable and for others I have several fall back parsers including an indieweb parser :) If you do find a website that is broken feel free to click the flag button or share it as I would love to fix any edge cases
Apr 2026 · tangled.org · its alternatives →
- 20
This gopher knows. Contribute to octohedron/TouristGopher development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21IB
I recently built an iOS app called Settld: Group Restaurant Finder that helps friends decide where to meet by finding restaurants that are roughly equally far from everyone’s location, and displaying information about them. We’ve all been in chaotic group chats where no one can agree on where to eat — this app cuts through that by calculating a “sweet spot” for the group. For 2 people, it’s the midpoint. For 3 people, it’s the circumcenter. For 4–6 people, it uses a minimum enclosing circle approach (Welzl’s algorithm). It then shows the top 15 nearby options so there’s no more “where do we…
2025 · settld.space · its alternatives →
- 22
Excited to share something I've been building recently called CandySearch. I made it to solve a personal pain with a SaaS product I built, which was that we were always monitoring Reddit and Twitter to see if anyone had mentioned keywords indicating they were looking for us. Before, we had to go manually respond to posts, often missing good mention opportunities. Would love for HN folks to try it and let me know what you think!
2025 · candysearch.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 23EI
2015 · eatkeep.io · its alternatives →
- 24
Bitemap▲3I know the internet likes to celebrate perfect bites and debate where to take the next bite of half-finished sandwiches. So I built Bitemap. You see a photo of a sandwich, you tap where you'd take your next bite, and it shows a heatmap of where everyone else bit. It's early. Most of the sandwiches are ones I uploaded to seed it and the maps are still filling in, so some are thin. You can add your own too. No signup, nothing to install. Curious what you think, and where you'd bite. Happy to answer anything about how it's built.
May 2026 · bitemap.food · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →