Understanding Search Rankings

Platebreaker ranks recipes using a score from -10 to +10 that tells you how well a recipe fits your current nutritional needs.

What the Scores Mean

High Scores (7 to 10)

These recipes fill your biggest nutritional gaps. They provide nutrients you’re running low on while avoiding ones you already have enough of, and they tend to hit multiple targets at once.

Medium Scores (3 to 6)

Decent recipes that contribute to some of your targets. They might be strong in a few nutrients but not across the board.

Low Scores (-2 to 2)

These mostly provide nutrients you’ve already met or exceeded today. They won’t hurt, but they won’t move the needle much either.

Negative Scores (-10 to -3)

Recipes with negative scores contain high amounts of nutrients you should limit, like sodium, saturated fat, or added sugars. Eating them could push you over your upper limits.

How Rankings Automatically Adjust

Recipe rankings are dynamic. They change throughout the day based on your current nutritional status.

Meals Already in Your Planner

When you add a meal to your planner, Platebreaker calculates the nutrients in that meal, updates your status for the day, and instantly recalculates rankings for all other recipes.

For example, if you add a salmon recipe high in omega-3 to lunch, other omega-3-rich recipes will drop in ranking for the rest of the day because you’ve already met much of that target.

Stored Nutrients from Previous Meals

Your body stores certain nutrients for future use, and Platebreaker tracks this. Water-soluble vitamins (B vitamins, vitamin C) and protein need daily replenishment since they aren’t stored significantly. Fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) and minerals (calcium, iron, etc.) are stored for multiple days.

If you exceeded your vitamin A target yesterday, Platebreaker remembers the stored amount and adjusts today’s rankings. You’ll see lower scores for vitamin A-rich recipes today.

Learn more about nutrient cycles and storage

What About Missed Meals?

If you ate a meal but forgot to log it, your rankings will assume you didn’t get those nutrients.

To get accurate rankings, add the missed meal before your next search. It doesn’t matter when you log it, just add it before searching so Platebreaker can account for those nutrients. Search for a recipe that resembles what you ate.

For meals from past days, the default storage cycle is 7 days. If you’re logging something from more than 7 days ago (or beyond your custom storage period), most of those nutrients won’t carry forward since they would have already been accounted for. Adding very old meals makes less difference to current rankings.

In addition to the automatic ranking, you can refine results using the filter system. It has six tabs:

Tab	What it does
Sort By	Order results by top-rated (IMDB-weighted), rating, rating count, prep time, or newest. Each sort field supports ascending or descending order.
Features	Toggle filters: Has Image, Has Rating, English Only
Ranges	Set minimum and maximum for total time (0-240 minutes) and rating (0-5 stars)
Tags	Multi-select across five tag categories: Category, Cuisine, Dietary, Method, and Keyword
Domains	Filter by recipe source website
Date	Filter by when recipes were indexed, with presets for past year and past 5 years or a custom date range

The Tags tab uses a three-list system. You place tags into Any (OR), Required (AND), or Exclude (NOT) lists. The filter logic is: match any tag in the first list, require all tags in the second, and exclude anything in the third. This lets you build filters like “any Italian or Mexican cuisine, requires gluten-free, excludes dessert.”

Filters are shareable. The filter button generates a URL with all your settings encoded, so you can send someone a link that opens the filter modal with everything pre-populated.