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Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through

Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients. How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.

lerchmo 7y ago
I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  >Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant. Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners. When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for." Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic. Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers. Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.
  - kristopolous 7y ago
    There's also manual tweaking. It's why known scam phishing sites and DMCA takedowns don't "win". It's not just some simple disinterested mathematical orchestration without any engagement or other layer
  - swasheck 7y ago
    Seems like it’d be fairly straightforward to identify a post by genre and then weight for terseness.
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
    Long time ago having your site in a high quality curated directory like DMOZ boosted your search ranks a lot. I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.
com2kid 7y ago
Filler content is the cost of ad supported content sites. Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  I have never understood what the filler content on recipe pages is accomplishing though. It somehow makes the page do better in google? How?
  - wolco 7y ago
    Plain and simple, Google won't rank you without it. Google looks for additional filler when ranking. Otherwise you would see different kinds of sites.
    - DeathArrow 7y ago
      Then we have to blame Google, not the authors.
    - jrochkind1 7y ago
      Right, but is there any explanation for why a recipe page with several pages of filler content ranks better on Google though? I assume (?) it is not google engineers tuning for this particular outcome on purpose... Not all that plain and simple.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    More space for ads.
- dceddia 7y ago
  And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one. I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.
coryrc 7y ago
It lets you know whether the recipe is any good. You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good. You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.
egypturnash 7y ago
Or you could buy a cookbook. There's a bunch of them out there. Some are good, some are bad, some are long-lived classics, some are deep dives into a particular cuisine by someone who knows it inside out. You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...
- giardini 7y ago
  My local libraries always have donated cookbooks for sale for 25 cents to a dollar. What is surprising is their number and variety.
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  Books? You mean those old fashioned things made out of paper with black signs on it? Most are black and white only and don't even have pictures. Grandpa used to read that.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    Yes! Books. Most cookbooks have a lot of full color pictures. They also lack ads, if they have a story to give context to the writer’s relationship with the cuisine it will be a few paragraphs introducing the whole book rather than at the head of every recipe. They do not have any DRM; once you buy one it is yours to keep, give, or loan as you will. If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying. It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!
stevekemp 7y ago
Even worse when you do find the recipe it uses some crazy measuring system! What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arpa 7y ago
  Psst, dude, i recently found out there are conversion tables for Freedom Units!
- umvi 7y ago
  Most Americans don't have a kitchen scale
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    I know that different cultures are different, but I always think of Americans as being (kitchen) gadget-obsessed. Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks. (I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)
    - umvi 7y ago
      It's because Americans mainly cook with volumes ("1 cup flour") and not masses ("100g flour"). Just look at any American recipe book - it will use volumes instead of weights.
    - richjdsmith 7y ago
      Wait, Canadian here, American's don't have electric kettles?

lerchmo 7y ago

I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?

wlesieutre 7y ago
>Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant. Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners. When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for." Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic. Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers. Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  There's also manual tweaking. It's why known scam phishing sites and DMCA takedowns don't "win". It's not just some simple disinterested mathematical orchestration without any engagement or other layer
- swasheck 7y ago
  Seems like it’d be fairly straightforward to identify a post by genre and then weight for terseness.
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  Long time ago having your site in a high quality curated directory like DMOZ boosted your search ranks a lot. I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.

com2kid 7y ago

Filler content is the cost of ad supported content sites. Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.

jrochkind1 7y ago
I have never understood what the filler content on recipe pages is accomplishing though. It somehow makes the page do better in google? How?
- wolco 7y ago
  Plain and simple, Google won't rank you without it. Google looks for additional filler when ranking. Otherwise you would see different kinds of sites.
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
    Then we have to blame Google, not the authors.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    Right, but is there any explanation for why a recipe page with several pages of filler content ranks better on Google though? I assume (?) it is not google engineers tuning for this particular outcome on purpose... Not all that plain and simple.
- com2kid 7y ago
  More space for ads.
dceddia 7y ago
And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one. I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.

coryrc 7y ago

It lets you know whether the recipe is any good. You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good. You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.

egypturnash 7y ago

Or you could buy a cookbook. There's a bunch of them out there. Some are good, some are bad, some are long-lived classics, some are deep dives into a particular cuisine by someone who knows it inside out. You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...

giardini 7y ago
My local libraries always have donated cookbooks for sale for 25 cents to a dollar. What is surprising is their number and variety.
DeathArrow 7y ago
Books? You mean those old fashioned things made out of paper with black signs on it? Most are black and white only and don't even have pictures. Grandpa used to read that.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Yes! Books. Most cookbooks have a lot of full color pictures. They also lack ads, if they have a story to give context to the writer’s relationship with the cuisine it will be a few paragraphs introducing the whole book rather than at the head of every recipe. They do not have any DRM; once you buy one it is yours to keep, give, or loan as you will. If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying. It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!

stevekemp 7y ago

Even worse when you do find the recipe it uses some crazy measuring system! What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
arpa 7y ago
Psst, dude, i recently found out there are conversion tables for Freedom Units!
umvi 7y ago
Most Americans don't have a kitchen scale
- stevekemp 7y ago
  I know that different cultures are different, but I always think of Americans as being (kitchen) gadget-obsessed. Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks. (I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)
  - umvi 7y ago
    It's because Americans mainly cook with volumes ("1 cup flour") and not masses ("100g flour"). Just look at any American recipe book - it will use volumes instead of weights.
  - richjdsmith 7y ago
    Wait, Canadian here, American's don't have electric kettles?