8 ms·

This is merely a consequence of SEO. Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. I don't need irrelevant life stories-- show me the ingredi

This is merely a consequence of SEO. Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. I don't need irrelevant life stories-- show me the ingredient list and instructions.

angmarsbane 6y ago
I use the copymethat browser plugin to strip everything but the recipe out of the page - I HIGHLY recommend it.
azinman2 6y ago
All that is there for SEO? I’ve been wondering why this new format is so ubiquitous.
puranjay 6y ago
Blame Google. A few years ago, it started prioritizing pages that had a high word count. So SEOs had no option but to pad up their pages with filler content. I've personally seen a page go from #20 to #2 just by adding 1000 extra words of content.
- akiselev 6y ago
  It's more than that. Google tracks how long you stay on a page whenever you use the back button to go back to the search results. The longer you stay on that page, the better the page will rank so once everyone figured it out, we started getting all that useless fluff before recipes because it increases the time spent on pages.
  - puranjay 6y ago
    Longer content also means you can cram more keywords in there, which means that your page can rank for a broader range of queries. It works from an SEO perspective but as a user, I really wish they'd do away with it.
  - kohtatsu 6y ago
    I've thought a lot about how Google is fucking privacy over, but I haven't appreciated how badly they've managed to hamper the web. It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship. It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces. I think Google and Facebook have a lot to atone for.
    - puranjay 6y ago
      And they're not even trying to pretend to be subtle about it anymore. AMP is the best example. Google is acting almost like malware, taking over a site and destroying the experience. It's honestly sad. Google could have gone in such a different direction. They're sitting on a gold mine but they caved into investor pressure to keep on pumping more gold instead of being happy with just the billions they would have made anyway.
      - 1propionyl 6y ago
        As an experiment, try adding ampproject.org and google.com/amp to your blacklist and living with it for a week. I've been doing this for quite a while now, and it's placed in stark relief how bad the problem is getting. It used to be that a few results were AMP, usually news sites, but you could easily bypass it via the (i) icon. Then it was that most results that were content focused (not dynamic sites or web apps) were were AMP, but you could easily bypass it. Today, most results are AMP, even for sites which are dynamic (e.g. Reddit), and to make matters worse, the (i) links of many websites have now started linking to AMP pages themselves. You might be thinking "ah, well those are their self-hosted copies. Shouldn't that be fine? The problem is Google's use of AMP, not the format itself, right?" Funny thing that: those "self-hosted" AMP pages also won't load with the above two blacklist rules. Also, many image search results are now somehow AMP (...how does that even make sense? It's just an image, so just serve me the image!). And for a while, you couldn't bypass it at all.
    - basch 6y ago
      >SEO hacking isn't an easy problem It isnt and it is. With how many employees they have, it wouldnt be that hard to come up with a "preferlist" that always outranks other content, and have that list constantly maintained, verified, and checked. Googler runs across a high quality site, it gets nominated for the preferlist. Preferred site descends into clickbait, they get removed. The problem both Google and Facebook have is because of their attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality, that they refuse to just say "we decided these sites are just better" like they should. The whole reason I go to google is because they are supposed to return better results.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Jesus we need to free this technology from corporate control.
subpixel 6y ago
Why would a recipe that features off-topic content rank higher than one that is just the recipe? I've thought that the reason recipes are hell on the internet is to need to make space for display ads, e.g. putting the content in slideshows where some slides are ads.
jedberg 6y ago
I get the long content for SEO, but what I don't get is why the recipe isn't right up top. Or there isn't just a link at the top that says "take me to the recipe".
- dariusj18 6y ago
  As you scroll that's more opportunities to show you ads.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Sure for the sites that show ads. But I'm taking about the ones where they literally just put the story in to rank higher in search results. The ones just doing it to share their recipe.
    - bfdm 6y ago
      Same reason, more room to cram ads you have to scroll past to see the actual recipe.
    - coldpie 6y ago
      Some people legit just enjoy reading & writing that content.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - dwiel 6y ago
      It doesnt have to be a conscious process for everyone. It could be that google just prefers to show you pages with these patterns even if most pages dont. Or could be writers that dont do this quit because no one reads them.
- sct202 6y ago
  I've only recently noticed that a lot of recipe websites do have those links, but a lot of them are styled like the "share this on X" buttons or very faint that I've been instinctively blind to them for years.
derefr 6y ago
I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting: • an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume their regional growing conditions or food-product design carry over world-wide — so no "sticks" of butter, no "glugs" of oil (from what spout diameter?), no "drops" of flavorings, no "inches" of ginger, etc. Give me volumes! Weights! Molar concentrations! (Half-kidding on the last one.) • put all references to an ingredient in the steps in bold, and always use the same name for an ingredient that the ingredients table itself uses. • no implicit ingredients (yes, put the salt and water that the pasta gets boiled in, into the ingredients! Let me mise en place without reading the steps!) Also, don't say "200g sugar" if you mean "100g sugar for the cake sub-recipe; 100g sugar for the frosting sub-recipe." Break those out, so that the fact that those separate quantities should be kept separate is explicit, rather than something you must implicitly gather from the steps. • or go further and make the ingredients table into its own kind of "pre-recipe" — a sequence of preparation steps. Not only "measuring things into bowls", but also steps such as: explicitly buying things day-of if they're best fresh; or defrosting, if the ingredient is often kept frozen (with defrosting times added to the total amount of time the recipe takes!); etc. Write down exactly what a chef would train their prep cooks to do for them in the preparation phase of this recipe. • a print stylesheet that makes the webpage come out as a single compact printed page, with a big title, large text, a small picture of the finished product, and no dead space or colored backgrounds (or alternately, a link to a single-page pre-generated PDF with even-more exacting formatting.) I don't want my iPad (that keeps going to sleep and must be woken up with dirty fingers, and can get splattered by oil) in the kitchen; I want to print recipes and put them in transparent binder sleeves. Give me recipe pages I can both easily flip through, and easily find. Let me build a quality printed cookbook, one page at a time, out of my favourite selected recipes from your site. • a universal "set serving size" client-side Javascript adjuster, which not only manipulates the ingredients but also the correct timings for steps that depend on weights (e.g. defrosting, searing.) None of this "until 165C internally" nonsense; I always buy the same cuts of meat, so calculate the time required for my food to come to temperature, and then tell it to me. Maybe also insert the adjusted amount of the ingredient being used into the text of the steps, so it actually says "add the milk (1tbsp)" rather than just "add the milk." (The ingredients list is for shopping/prep-phase; I should be able to cook without referring to it!) • each ingredient name in the ingredients table should have a side-link to a page that talks about substitutes for that ingredient, and how to adjust recipes for that substitution. Ingredients with common substitutes should offer an adjustor select-box right there in the ingredients table, where tweaking it changes the recipe appropriately. (Which means the recipe can now include things that are highly-dependent, e.g. it can ask you what pasta you're using, and then embed in the steps the correct cooking time for that type of pasta; and since the recipe knows what kind of recipe it is, it can specify the al-dente time target if it's baked pasta, or the fully-cooked time target if it's a pasta salad.) • When a recipe is actually just an arbitrary linearization of a few concurrent sub-recipes (e.g. a dish to cook, and a sauce you prepare and then pour over it right before serving), make this clear. Draw boxes around the sub-recipes' steps, and number those boxes. Then put a little boxes-and-arrows workflow diagram for how the numbered sub-recipes relate to each-other at the top of the steps. Represent each sub-recipe in the diagram as a box with a height proportional to how long its steps take—such that you can eyeball which sub-recipe you'll be done with first. Label the boxes with timers that should be set at the beginning of them (because almost always the end of a box is "take off heat" or "take out of oven.") I'd bookmark a site like that directly, and use it religiously in preference to any other recipe provider.
KajMagnus 6y ago
Wow it's for real (!). I just searched for "falafel recipie".
tdeck 6y ago
I hate this! The worst part is they often include a trimmed down version of the recipe up top that leaves out key info, so you think "oh this recipe is no good" but then the real recipe is at the bottom past the author's life story and commentary on the season.
cosmie 6y ago
The SEO implications definitely have a massive influence on it, but it's also a consequence of copyright law. A recipe in and of itself isn't copyrightable, but recipes fluffed up with a bunch of prose may qualify as a literary work and the recipe itself gains copyright protection as a component of that literary work[1]. [1] "How do I protect my recipe?" section of https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
- rimunroe 6y ago
  I’ve heard this several times, but as far as I know this only means a person wouldn’t be able to copy the whole work, but that they’d still be absolutely allowed to extract/copy the recipe itself (in the form of the ingredients and the steps needed to make the food)
  - cosmie 6y ago
    I can't speak to other forms of copyrights, but literary copyrights also protect derivative works[1]. It'd likely be hard to prove for isolated incidences or sufficiently generic recipes, but but if someone extracted and republished recipes en masse, you could establish that they're deriving those recipes from your works and violating your copyright. Edit: See my comment here[1] for more details and an example of the issue you run into, particularly with the "steps" component. [1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/copyright-for-literary-work/ https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23874340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23874340
    - ac29 6y ago
      I would be very surprised if extracting a non-copyrightable recipe out of a copyrightable longer text wouldn't qualify as fair use.
    - rimunroe 6y ago
      I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that reasoning holds up. An uninformed reading of 17 USC 102(b) sounds like it directly contradicts your theory: > 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. This seems like a good summary of a relevant case and the relevant copyright law[1]. The gist of it is that even if a work is copyrightable, that doesn't extend to facts contained within it (such as the ingredients and process required to make a dish). [1] https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipes/ https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...
oh_sigh 6y ago
There are extensions which try to extract the recipe out of the page and display it directly. e.g. for chrome (I don't endorse this, just an example): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... A problem is that sometimes the bloggers will write modifications or amendments mixed into their prose, and not reference them in the actual recipe instructions (e.g. the recipe calls for 400g of flour, but somewhere in the autobiography, the author says "The recipe calls for 400g but I find 600g to produce a much better end result") I think, ultimately, one should not google around for recipes from random bloggers, and instead only take recipes from actual cookbooks. When you find a random person's blog, you have no idea what their skill levels are, what their motivations are for writing(usually just to make $$$ via a blog). For example, I ran across a recipe which the end product had raw flour in it, and a commenter on the site said that they should put a warning for pregnant people to not do this, and the blogger came through and said that raw flour is not only not bad for pregnant women, but is actually good for pregnant women, which goes against all known advice from healthcare professionals.
bachmeier 6y ago
As I've been saying for a while, Google is more vulnerable than at any time in the last 20 years. It no longer has much to offer. There's an opening for someone with good execution...
hangonhn 6y ago
"show me the ingredient list and instructions." YES! I don't want your backstory. I don't want to be mean but I'm just not that interested in you Mr./Ms. random Internet poster. I would often just close the tab if I see these recipes. I didn't realize it was because of SEO. I thought it was some ego thing among the writers. This site has recipes in exactly the format I want and it is to the point: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
- coldpie 6y ago
  I just about fell out of my seat when I first found that "for engineers" recipe format a few years ago, as it's almost exactly how I jot recipes down. List of ingredients, then a }-style paren of subgroups with instructions what to do with them, cascading off to the right. Years and years of doing that, and boom, there it is almost verbatim, totally independently developed by someone else.
guygurari 6y ago
For recipes I use the Paprika app [1]. I point it at one of these terrible websites and it will scrape out the ingredients and instructions and present them in a useful way. It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well. [1] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/
nicbou 6y ago
And yet somehow, the top-ranking results for everything seems to be spam that breaks all the rules. I'm constantly disappointed by how ad-infested the search results are. It's really hard to get a direct answer nowadays.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  I'd love to have a search engine that heavily penalizes advertisements.
jordanpg 6y ago
https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/
- dang 6y ago
  Discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864
throwawaygh 6y ago
SEO gaming is an existential threat to Google. If they can't even help me find non-pathological writeups of basic recipes, they've got some big problems.
centerthiz99 6y ago
Disagree. This is old journalism 101. I remember hearing about this years ago in civics class. Newspapers put all the meat in the headline and first couple paragraphs. Old newspapers are a Google search away to verify. Lots of the same behavior as you see on sites like Huff Post. It would be more accurate to say SEO borrowed a habit of shallow attention grabbing from news editors. But humans have evolved into wanting depth in their ideas. We’re into more detail all the way through now. Look at popular media, sci fi and magical worlds, deep character connectivity. Look at Serial and anything Ken Burns. Depth is cared about AND sells. Bloomberg is relevant cause Bloomberg is rich. That Bloomberg is not capable of depth isn’t a surprise.
sammalloy 6y ago
> Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. Yeah, I went down this rabbit hole a few weeks ago while I was trying to find the perfect pizza dough recipes. On the other hand, I've had much better success getting right to the ingredient list and instructions using Pinterest and Instagram instead.
boogies 6y ago
> Have you tried searching for recipes? DuckDuckGo's Yummly-powered instant answers work fine (one click, no scrolling to ingredients, although there seem to be affiliate links to them involved).
rendaw 6y ago
This sounds really strange to me. I don't wake up, sit down for breakfast, think "hmm I really want to read news about hacking wallstreet with pens", then google it. I open up a news website's front page and see what they have there.
tomerv 6y ago
I am pretty sure this reporting style predates internet journalism. I see it as a very American style. It appears in almost all long form articles in English language articles. Almost every article has this irrelevant segue about a third way into it, always with a description of the physical appearance of the character (how they talk, what they wear). It's so boring and useless.

This is merely a consequence of SEO. Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. I don't need irrelevant life stories-- show me the ingredient list and instructions.

angmarsbane 6y ago

I use the copymethat browser plugin to strip everything but the recipe out of the page - I HIGHLY recommend it.

azinman2 6y ago

All that is there for SEO? I’ve been wondering why this new format is so ubiquitous.

puranjay 6y ago

Blame Google. A few years ago, it started prioritizing pages that had a high word count. So SEOs had no option but to pad up their pages with filler content. I've personally seen a page go from #20 to #2 just by adding 1000 extra words of content.

akiselev 6y ago
It's more than that. Google tracks how long you stay on a page whenever you use the back button to go back to the search results. The longer you stay on that page, the better the page will rank so once everyone figured it out, we started getting all that useless fluff before recipes because it increases the time spent on pages.
- puranjay 6y ago
  Longer content also means you can cram more keywords in there, which means that your page can rank for a broader range of queries. It works from an SEO perspective but as a user, I really wish they'd do away with it.
- kohtatsu 6y ago
  I've thought a lot about how Google is fucking privacy over, but I haven't appreciated how badly they've managed to hamper the web. It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship. It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces. I think Google and Facebook have a lot to atone for.
  - puranjay 6y ago
    And they're not even trying to pretend to be subtle about it anymore. AMP is the best example. Google is acting almost like malware, taking over a site and destroying the experience. It's honestly sad. Google could have gone in such a different direction. They're sitting on a gold mine but they caved into investor pressure to keep on pumping more gold instead of being happy with just the billions they would have made anyway.
    - 1propionyl 6y ago
      As an experiment, try adding ampproject.org and google.com/amp to your blacklist and living with it for a week. I've been doing this for quite a while now, and it's placed in stark relief how bad the problem is getting. It used to be that a few results were AMP, usually news sites, but you could easily bypass it via the (i) icon. Then it was that most results that were content focused (not dynamic sites or web apps) were were AMP, but you could easily bypass it. Today, most results are AMP, even for sites which are dynamic (e.g. Reddit), and to make matters worse, the (i) links of many websites have now started linking to AMP pages themselves. You might be thinking "ah, well those are their self-hosted copies. Shouldn't that be fine? The problem is Google's use of AMP, not the format itself, right?" Funny thing that: those "self-hosted" AMP pages also won't load with the above two blacklist rules. Also, many image search results are now somehow AMP (...how does that even make sense? It's just an image, so just serve me the image!). And for a while, you couldn't bypass it at all.
  - basch 6y ago
    >SEO hacking isn't an easy problem It isnt and it is. With how many employees they have, it wouldnt be that hard to come up with a "preferlist" that always outranks other content, and have that list constantly maintained, verified, and checked. Googler runs across a high quality site, it gets nominated for the preferlist. Preferred site descends into clickbait, they get removed. The problem both Google and Facebook have is because of their attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality, that they refuse to just say "we decided these sites are just better" like they should. The whole reason I go to google is because they are supposed to return better results.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Jesus we need to free this technology from corporate control.

subpixel 6y ago

Why would a recipe that features off-topic content rank higher than one that is just the recipe? I've thought that the reason recipes are hell on the internet is to need to make space for display ads, e.g. putting the content in slideshows where some slides are ads.

jedberg 6y ago

I get the long content for SEO, but what I don't get is why the recipe isn't right up top. Or there isn't just a link at the top that says "take me to the recipe".

dariusj18 6y ago
As you scroll that's more opportunities to show you ads.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Sure for the sites that show ads. But I'm taking about the ones where they literally just put the story in to rank higher in search results. The ones just doing it to share their recipe.
  - bfdm 6y ago
    Same reason, more room to cram ads you have to scroll past to see the actual recipe.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    Some people legit just enjoy reading & writing that content.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - dwiel 6y ago
    It doesnt have to be a conscious process for everyone. It could be that google just prefers to show you pages with these patterns even if most pages dont. Or could be writers that dont do this quit because no one reads them.
sct202 6y ago
I've only recently noticed that a lot of recipe websites do have those links, but a lot of them are styled like the "share this on X" buttons or very faint that I've been instinctively blind to them for years.

derefr 6y ago

I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting: • an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume their regional growing conditions or food-product design carry over world-wide — so no "sticks" of butter, no "glugs" of oil (from what spout diameter?), no "drops" of flavorings, no "inches" of ginger, etc. Give me volumes! Weights! Molar concentrations! (Half-kidding on the last one.) • put all references to an ingredient in the steps in bold, and always use the same name for an ingredient that the ingredients table itself uses. • no implicit ingredients (yes, put the salt and water that the pasta gets boiled in, into the ingredients! Let me mise en place without reading the steps!) Also, don't say "200g sugar" if you mean "100g sugar for the cake sub-recipe; 100g sugar for the frosting sub-recipe." Break those out, so that the fact that those separate quantities should be kept separate is explicit, rather than something you must implicitly gather from the steps. • or go further and make the ingredients table into its own kind of "pre-recipe" — a sequence of preparation steps. Not only "measuring things into bowls", but also steps such as: explicitly buying things day-of if they're best fresh; or defrosting, if the ingredient is often kept frozen (with defrosting times added to the total amount of time the recipe takes!); etc. Write down exactly what a chef would train their prep cooks to do for them in the preparation phase of this recipe. • a print stylesheet that makes the webpage come out as a single compact printed page, with a big title, large text, a small picture of the finished product, and no dead space or colored backgrounds (or alternately, a link to a single-page pre-generated PDF with even-more exacting formatting.) I don't want my iPad (that keeps going to sleep and must be woken up with dirty fingers, and can get splattered by oil) in the kitchen; I want to print recipes and put them in transparent binder sleeves. Give me recipe pages I can both easily flip through, and easily find. Let me build a quality printed cookbook, one page at a time, out of my favourite selected recipes from your site. • a universal "set serving size" client-side Javascript adjuster, which not only manipulates the ingredients but also the correct timings for steps that depend on weights (e.g. defrosting, searing.) None of this "until 165C internally" nonsense; I always buy the same cuts of meat, so calculate the time required for my food to come to temperature, and then tell it to me. Maybe also insert the adjusted amount of the ingredient being used into the text of the steps, so it actually says "add the milk (1tbsp)" rather than just "add the milk." (The ingredients list is for shopping/prep-phase; I should be able to cook without referring to it!) • each ingredient name in the ingredients table should have a side-link to a page that talks about substitutes for that ingredient, and how to adjust recipes for that substitution. Ingredients with common substitutes should offer an adjustor select-box right there in the ingredients table, where tweaking it changes the recipe appropriately. (Which means the recipe can now include things that are highly-dependent, e.g. it can ask you what pasta you're using, and then embed in the steps the correct cooking time for that type of pasta; and since the recipe knows what kind of recipe it is, it can specify the al-dente time target if it's baked pasta, or the fully-cooked time target if it's a pasta salad.) • When a recipe is actually just an arbitrary linearization of a few concurrent sub-recipes (e.g. a dish to cook, and a sauce you prepare and then pour over it right before serving), make this clear. Draw boxes around the sub-recipes' steps, and number those boxes. Then put a little boxes-and-arrows workflow diagram for how the numbered sub-recipes relate to each-other at the top of the steps. Represent each sub-recipe in the diagram as a box with a height proportional to how long its steps take—such that you can eyeball which sub-recipe you'll be done with first. Label the boxes with timers that should be set at the beginning of them (because almost always the end of a box is "take off heat" or "take out of oven.") I'd bookmark a site like that directly, and use it religiously in preference to any other recipe provider.

KajMagnus 6y ago

Wow it's for real (!). I just searched for "falafel recipie".

tdeck 6y ago

I hate this! The worst part is they often include a trimmed down version of the recipe up top that leaves out key info, so you think "oh this recipe is no good" but then the real recipe is at the bottom past the author's life story and commentary on the season.

cosmie 6y ago

The SEO implications definitely have a massive influence on it, but it's also a consequence of copyright law. A recipe in and of itself isn't copyrightable, but recipes fluffed up with a bunch of prose may qualify as a literary work and the recipe itself gains copyright protection as a component of that literary work[1]. [1] "How do I protect my recipe?" section of https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

rimunroe 6y ago
I’ve heard this several times, but as far as I know this only means a person wouldn’t be able to copy the whole work, but that they’d still be absolutely allowed to extract/copy the recipe itself (in the form of the ingredients and the steps needed to make the food)
- cosmie 6y ago
  I can't speak to other forms of copyrights, but literary copyrights also protect derivative works[1]. It'd likely be hard to prove for isolated incidences or sufficiently generic recipes, but but if someone extracted and republished recipes en masse, you could establish that they're deriving those recipes from your works and violating your copyright. Edit: See my comment here[1] for more details and an example of the issue you run into, particularly with the "steps" component. [1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/copyright-for-literary-work/ https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23874340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23874340
  - ac29 6y ago
    I would be very surprised if extracting a non-copyrightable recipe out of a copyrightable longer text wouldn't qualify as fair use.
  - rimunroe 6y ago
    I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that reasoning holds up. An uninformed reading of 17 USC 102(b) sounds like it directly contradicts your theory: > 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. This seems like a good summary of a relevant case and the relevant copyright law[1]. The gist of it is that even if a work is copyrightable, that doesn't extend to facts contained within it (such as the ingredients and process required to make a dish). [1] https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipes/ https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...

oh_sigh 6y ago

There are extensions which try to extract the recipe out of the page and display it directly. e.g. for chrome (I don't endorse this, just an example): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... A problem is that sometimes the bloggers will write modifications or amendments mixed into their prose, and not reference them in the actual recipe instructions (e.g. the recipe calls for 400g of flour, but somewhere in the autobiography, the author says "The recipe calls for 400g but I find 600g to produce a much better end result") I think, ultimately, one should not google around for recipes from random bloggers, and instead only take recipes from actual cookbooks. When you find a random person's blog, you have no idea what their skill levels are, what their motivations are for writing(usually just to make $$$ via a blog). For example, I ran across a recipe which the end product had raw flour in it, and a commenter on the site said that they should put a warning for pregnant people to not do this, and the blogger came through and said that raw flour is not only not bad for pregnant women, but is actually good for pregnant women, which goes against all known advice from healthcare professionals.

bachmeier 6y ago

As I've been saying for a while, Google is more vulnerable than at any time in the last 20 years. It no longer has much to offer. There's an opening for someone with good execution...

hangonhn 6y ago

"show me the ingredient list and instructions." YES! I don't want your backstory. I don't want to be mean but I'm just not that interested in you Mr./Ms. random Internet poster. I would often just close the tab if I see these recipes. I didn't realize it was because of SEO. I thought it was some ego thing among the writers. This site has recipes in exactly the format I want and it is to the point: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

coldpie 6y ago
I just about fell out of my seat when I first found that "for engineers" recipe format a few years ago, as it's almost exactly how I jot recipes down. List of ingredients, then a }-style paren of subgroups with instructions what to do with them, cascading off to the right. Years and years of doing that, and boom, there it is almost verbatim, totally independently developed by someone else.

guygurari 6y ago

For recipes I use the Paprika app [1]. I point it at one of these terrible websites and it will scrape out the ingredients and instructions and present them in a useful way. It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well. [1] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/

nicbou 6y ago

And yet somehow, the top-ranking results for everything seems to be spam that breaks all the rules. I'm constantly disappointed by how ad-infested the search results are. It's really hard to get a direct answer nowadays.

ajmurmann 6y ago
I'd love to have a search engine that heavily penalizes advertisements.

jordanpg 6y ago

https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/

dang 6y ago
Discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864

throwawaygh 6y ago

SEO gaming is an existential threat to Google. If they can't even help me find non-pathological writeups of basic recipes, they've got some big problems.

centerthiz99 6y ago

Disagree. This is old journalism 101. I remember hearing about this years ago in civics class. Newspapers put all the meat in the headline and first couple paragraphs. Old newspapers are a Google search away to verify. Lots of the same behavior as you see on sites like Huff Post. It would be more accurate to say SEO borrowed a habit of shallow attention grabbing from news editors. But humans have evolved into wanting depth in their ideas. We’re into more detail all the way through now. Look at popular media, sci fi and magical worlds, deep character connectivity. Look at Serial and anything Ken Burns. Depth is cared about AND sells. Bloomberg is relevant cause Bloomberg is rich. That Bloomberg is not capable of depth isn’t a surprise.

sammalloy 6y ago

> Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. Yeah, I went down this rabbit hole a few weeks ago while I was trying to find the perfect pizza dough recipes. On the other hand, I've had much better success getting right to the ingredient list and instructions using Pinterest and Instagram instead.

boogies 6y ago

> Have you tried searching for recipes? DuckDuckGo's Yummly-powered instant answers work fine (one click, no scrolling to ingredients, although there seem to be affiliate links to them involved).

rendaw 6y ago

This sounds really strange to me. I don't wake up, sit down for breakfast, think "hmm I really want to read news about hacking wallstreet with pens", then google it. I open up a news website's front page and see what they have there.

tomerv 6y ago

I am pretty sure this reporting style predates internet journalism. I see it as a very American style. It appears in almost all long form articles in English language articles. Almost every article has this irrelevant segue about a third way into it, always with a description of the physical appearance of the character (how they talk, what they wear). It's so boring and useless.