Every day at around 4 p.m., as the air cools down, the sky takes on a purple hue and schoolchildren make their way home, hordes of people across Japan — predominantly female, predominantly in their 30s — start furiously typing on their PCs. They all have one burning question on their minds: "What should I cook for dinner?"
As food prices have soared recently, the need to eat at home has become more of a reality for many people, and the chances are that many of them are searching for recipes on cooking Web sites, which are full of quick-and-easy recipes and colorful photos, most often contributed by ordinary users.
Cookpad.com, a Japanese-language Web site with more than 430,000 user-contributed recipes, has gained prominence in recent years for the sheer number of recipes it puts just a few quick clicks away. Now, 10 years since its launch, Cookpad has 4.55 million unique users and attracts 278 million page views per month. As of press time, it was the 79th most popular site in Japan and the 998th across the entire Web, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Web traffic.