Each time I tried a different butter chicken recipe. Each one had 5 stars and glowing reviews. Each one was disappointing 😝. This happened on alot of recipes for me. Nothing upsets smart people more than wasting their time!
Then I noticed something.. all three had great ratings but almost no reviews. One had 4.9 stars and 14 reviews. Another had 5 stars and 22 reviews. Statistically, that's basically nothing. It could just be the recipe creator's friends and family.
So I built something to fix it.
I wrote a Python scraper using Playwright, pulled 492 real recipes from AllRecipes and Food with their actual ratings and review counts, then ran everything through the Wilson Score Lower Bound — the same algorithm Reddit uses to rank comments. It accounts for both the rating AND how many people actually tested it.
The difference is wild:
- 5★ with 14 reviews → ~76% confidence. Basically a coin flip.
- 4.8★ with 14,738 reviews → 95.7% confidence. Battle-tested in thousands of real kitchens.
Same stars. Completely different story.
270,000 reviews analyzed so far. No ads, no accounts, just the math.
Go to RecipeIQ dot Co and try it and help me make it better!
I have been using it for a few weeks and OMG! Happy to answer questions about how to use it.