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Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Goog

• theturtletalks 7y ago
  So true. Whenever I look up something now I just add Reddit afterwards. It's been working well so far, but I guess that can be manipulated as well.
  • outime 7y ago
    Not OP but yes, I’ve also been doing this for a long time and it does help.
  • minitoar 7y ago
    Or “wiki”.
    • carlob 7y ago
      or use duckduckgo's bangs
  • CondensedBrain 7y ago
    Site searching Reddit can at least give some ideas for different words to try. Most of my problems finding things on Google stem from its declining ability to make a reasonable guess based on what I put in. It's not enough to have a word anymore. You have to know the right keyphrase or it shows a whole different world of results. It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.
  • rlucas 7y ago
    There’s a reason that works (sorta, mostly, and when it does). The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining. Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments). The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this “real” content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness. All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc. One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it’s probably worth reading. If not, who knows. (Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)
  • nunez 7y ago
    site:reddit.com; after every search!
  • bash-j 7y ago
    When I search for free software I usually put forum in the search terms as it helps filter out the malicious sites and the software where they clearly ripped off the free software but ask for money to unlock the pro version. Plus I get to read why people recommend the software.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• mars4rp 7y ago
  yes, at the beginning Google got a huge market share because they were able to return the better result and don't return spammy and unrelated results. but they are not doing that anymore, it is really hard to find a not spammy (what you described) result on Google these days. and other search engines are only copying the Google algorithm we need to get back to judging a web page by its content, AI should be able to help now or soon.
  • graeme 7y ago
    Google actively encourages the recipe sites to add the fluff.
    • cylinder 7y ago
      Why doesn't Google disrupt itself -- the most concise, cleanest pages that focus on what the user is actually looking for (recipe, not a narrative) should be #1. It's even in Google's interest!
      • JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
        I think their market share encourages them to do nothing. You actually have to offer a good product to grow market share, then slowly run it, then users switch to a new product which originally starts good, and the cycle repeats. Nobody would start using Google Search in its current format.
      • rchaud 7y ago
        It has, and that's mentioned in the article. If you want to be #1 on the search page, buy an ad, because that will always appear above every "organic" search result. Ads are Google's bread and butter, and has been for the entirety of its existence as a public company.
• corodra 7y ago
  Those are the absolute worst. A recipe with someone's jackass life story for 2000 words. You start to wonder if it's even a recipe at all. You have to scroll for a good minute, hoping you didn't miss the recipe. Then come the ads that reformat the size of the page. Everything jumps around and you have to rescroll again. Exactly why I stick to cookbooks in the past year or so. More and more, "fuck the internet", long live murdering trees.
  • dheera 7y ago
    One thing about cookbooks is that the massive barrier to actually publishing and distributing is a natural filter for credibility; most cookbooks have tried-and-true recipes and are either authentic or a genuinely good adaptation by a skilled chef author. The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time. As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.
    • corodra 7y ago
      In my experience, ebook cookbooks get annoying when you have dirty fingers and the screen goes dark because you forgot to switch it back to always on. And there's a great tendency that the recipe is always fucking formatted so you have to scroll more or "turn the page". Cookbooks, at least the ones I own, are all formatted so you never have to turn the page. Seems silly, but that's important. Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.
    • com2kid 7y ago
      The flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes". The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate. (Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) ) Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant". I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwich-cookies/ https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...). Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...
• jacques_chester 7y ago
  > Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. And here I just thought people were basically self-absorbed wankers. My most recent impression: "I first learned about this recipe from my dog's aunt who was a lenape indian during the pre-cambrian era and she something something memories of childhood blah blah dinosaur steaks yap yap tedious digression on gritty herbs fluff fluff and so I was talking to my local grocer who put me onto an organic vegan gluten free biomagnetic interspordidial hyperflorpic gmo-free meg-free bpa-free taste-free free-free that reminded me of the time that..." JUST FUCKING TELL ME HOW TO COOK THE BEANS JANET
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    People are lazy and mostly do not want to write a 1000 words essay around the recipe they want to share. It takes a very unique kind of person to write those things. And those are the ones Google is giving all the voice, while taking it away from normal people.
  • clairity 7y ago
    that really made me laugh - i'm glad i had no liquids in my mouth at the time. =)
• jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago
  Re: recipes, you might be interested in this browser extension, which skips to the actual recipe text: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
• tayo42 7y ago
  Recipes are really bad on Google. There are also some odd aggregator sites I guess? Or just seem to copy from other places. Idk what their story is but they have tons of low effort recipes
• Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  Re: recipes, one of the potential reasons for this is that bare recipes are not copyrightable by law. Courts see them as algorithms, almost -- e.g., there are only so many ways to cook a grilled cheese sandwich. > 17 U.S.C. 102(b): In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. So it's been a tradition in the recipe space for decades to include lots of descriptive "filler" text when you're writing your recipe book/blog. That filler text is copyrightable, which gives you legal recourse against people who might try to wholesale copy your work. Of course, in the modern world, it's definitely true that they can also help with SEO. And honestly I wouldn't completely discount the idea of people actually reading them -- I know my wife has gone through phases where she has a couple different blogs bookmarked and will read through them to get ideas, but also because she liked the writing of the author.
  • detaro 7y ago
    That's not quite the same as the pattern the parent describes I think: There's a longer post before the recipe, not integrated into the recipe.
    • plotteddancer16 7y ago
      Ya, I believe the OP was talking about the five pages of story-telling before the recipe that requires you to annoyingly scroll until you find the recipe ingredient list. I came here for a cookie recipe, not a story about how you discovered you liked oatmeal cookies when you were 12, but then became a raisin-cookie fanatic, before moving back to chocolate chips, when you suddenly remembered your Grandma baked you peanut butter cookies as a kid. /sic
      • corodra 7y ago
        Oh, you forgot all their allergies. Every cook on the internet has an allergy to everything but the substitute. "That's when I found out I'm allergic to flour, eggs, milk, butter, salt, chocolate, meat and fruit. Here's my healthy recipe for chocolate chip cookies made from tofu, himalayan sand, gerbil presents and wheatgrass." No! First, it's not a chocolate chip cookie then! It's an unholy abomination of sadness. Wheatgrass is just lawn clippings! Something is wrong with you! Look, I have the very sad allergy to hazelnuts... I love hazelnuts... but they don't love me. Also soy. Soy is borderline deadly to me even in small amounts. So, I can't have asian food without cooking it myself. Fish sauce sans soy fermentation is my substitute. I do get the allergy issue and being left out in many foods. But I find it so damn hard to believe that all these people are allergic to everything but these "healthy alternatives" that end up being nutritionally empty. Then they wonder why they're suddenly anemic. Then they don't get enough sun because their skin "suddenly" became sensitive. Then they have depression issues. Then they can't shit straight. Then they start cutting back on other foods. Then they have to live on horse pills. Sorry, rant. Got angry. Fun argument to have with the next anti-vaxxer you meet. If they argue about mercury or lead being in vaccines, agree with them. Just flat out agree with how terrible it is. Then ask if they like Himalayan sea salt. There's like a 99.9% chance they love it, along with essential oils. "You do know there are more trace amounts of mercury and lead in Himalayan sea salt than in vaccines?" You will then agree with me that mental gymnastics needs to be in the next Olympics. It's amazing how they'll talk around it. Make some popcorn, open a beer and watch the show.
• ajmurmann 7y ago
  What I don't understand is why Google doesn't hell ban these pages. It seems trivial, at least as a human, to detect them. You don't even need to do this for all of them. Just banning a few hundred will deter everyone else.
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    What exactly is being hellbanned here? Any web page with an uninteresting preamble like most articles and blog posts online?
    • novia 7y ago
      Spammy websites. A flag tool given to long time Google account holders would be helpful.
  • reaperducer 7y ago
    What I don't understand is why Google doesn't hell ban these pages Because Google doesn't have a financial incentive to show you quick, quality answers to you questions. Google makes more money from you flailing around and fruitlessly searching over and over than giving you the right answer the first time.
    • mindcrime 7y ago
      Google makes more money from you flailing around and fruitlessly searching over and over than giving you the right answer the first time. That will work right up until the time somebody comes along and build a search engine (or other app) that will just "give you the right answer the first time." For all their size and power, there's really nothing - in principle - stopping somebody from coming along and doing to Google, what Google did to Altavista. Yes it would be hard to execute, which may be why it hasn't happened... yet.
• baddox 7y ago
  See also: most long-form journalism.
  • pbourke 7y ago
    Long-form journalism is what it’s advertised to be, at least.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• avip 7y ago
  Try google something like "how to do X on Y" or "what's the shortcut key for A in B". You have to crawl through piles of garbage like a racoon to find the one-liner you were looking for.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • Avamander 7y ago
    I have a good example for this, try googling how to make Linux ask for a password when using sudo.
• chrischen 7y ago
  Also superficially relevant recipes or just regurgitated content.
• Angostura 7y ago
  To be honest, I just tend to use one recipe site now - BBC Good Food. I ended up subscribing to the magazine since I was getting so many recipes from there. The user ratings on the recipes don't seemed to be gamed either - since there is no incentive to do so.
  • cylinder 7y ago
    I just add "serious eats" to my searches.
• hidiegomariani 7y ago
  bounce rates are supposed to demote this kind of content, even tho it doesn't seem to work properly imo
• api 7y ago
  This starts happening the instant a medium becomes a potential source of revenue. Look at most average TV: endless repetitive nonsense plots, drama, and other filler to serve as a medium for ads.
  • SantalBlush 7y ago
    Don't forget video games and loot crates! Most big-budget games are just a formula to encourage kids to shell out more money.
• deogeo 7y ago
  Is this the internet we are warned wouldn't exist without pervasive ads and spying?
• wmeredith 7y ago
  You could always, stay with me here, pay for content. Cooks Illustrated (no affiliation) is an awesome resource for those interested in recipes that are proven without the garbage.
• didibus 7y ago
  Ya, but how do you deal with it? You're just fighting a tug of war. Unless we go hack to curated content or paid, it is always going to be algorithm against SEO in an infinite race.
• ggggtez 7y ago
  >Google "How to learn x" On the other hand, if you Google "How to do X" you will often find a youtube video in the top results. But it will skip the intro and jump right to the important part. Sure there is a lot of garbage out there (e.g. everyone uploading 10 minute videos to hit the YouTube optimzation algorithm) but it does seem like Google does try to cut through some of the SEO garbage to get you the useful info faster.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    The fact you have to skip the intro to YouTube videos speaks to Google's algorithms. Even if people don't have ten minutes to say about a particular topic, they'll upload it. When people find out the metrics to getting more views, they become meaningless.
• dagw 7y ago
  Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs I just Googled Peking duck to try something at random. Of the links on the front page, one was to wikipedia, one was to an article about Peking duck, and the rest where recipe sites (BBC Food, Allrecipes, Serious Eats etc.) or serious looking/sounding food blogs that had the recipe front and center. I don't know if it's a geographic thing (I'm in Europe) or if Google has learnt my preferences, but finding 5 reasonable sounding recipes for Peking duck with Google was trivial. Edit: Played around some more and spotted an interesting pattern. If a look up typical US dishes, like Key lime pie or BBQ brisket, then I got results more like the ones you describe. But looking up more 'international' dishes like Peking duck or coq au vin then the results where almost all good quality recipes.