6 ms·

As long as few people use it, it will be great. Rest assured that the moment it becomes popular, the people who want to game it will appear.

jandrese 5y ago
This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.
- xtracto 5y ago
  That's why I use Saffron [1], it magically converts those sites into a page in my recipe book. I found it when the developer commented here in HN. Also, a lot of cooking website have started to add a link with "jump to recipe" functionality allowing you to skip all the crap. [1] https://www.mysaffronapp.com/ https://www.mysaffronapp.com/
  - Funes- 5y ago
    There's also https://based.cooking https://based.cooking.
    - eigengrau5150 5y ago
      Run by Luke Smith, an admitted neo-reactionary and possible white supremacist who writes like a 4chan reject.
- ggggtez 5y ago
  I've noticed this pattern start to pop up elsewhere. I've started to train my skimming skills, skipping a paragraph or two at a time to get past the fluff. Like an article about some current event will undoubtedly begin with "when I was traveling ten years ago...".
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  That sort of recipe blog hasn't happened just for SEO. It's also a bit of a "two audiences" problem: if you are coming to that food blogger from a search you certainly would prefer the recipe first and then maybe any commentary on it below if the recipe looks good. If you are a regular reader of that food blogger you are probably invested in the stories up top and that parasocial connection and the recipes themselves are sometimes incidental to why you are a regular reader. You see some of that "two readers" divide sometimes even in classic cookbooks, where "celebrity" chefs of the day might spend much of a cookbook on a long rambling memoir. Admittedly such books were generally well indexed and had table of contents to jump right to the recipes or particular recipes, but the concept of "long personal ramble of what these recipes mean to me" is an old one in cookbooks too.
  - run-types 5y ago
    I've basically never been taken to a recipe without a rambling preamble from Google. While food blogs may serve two audiences, a long introduction seems to be a requirement to appear in the top Google search results.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      Personally, I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that Google killed the Recipe Databases. There did used to be a few startups that tried to be Recipe Aggregators with advertising based business models, that would show recipes and then link to source blogs and/or cookbooks, and in the brief period where they existed Google scraped them entirely and showed entire recipes on search results and ate their ad revenue out from under them.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        That is a really bad thing by Google. Their core business is not recipes.
        kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
- SerLava 5y ago
  That's not really for SEO, which favors readily accessible information. That's ads. When mobile users have to scroll past 10 add, theyll click on some of them and make the blog money.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. I continue to be curious about this kind of complaint. If all you want is a recipe list, without any of the fluff, why would you click on a link to a blog, rather than on a link to a recipe aggregator? Foodie blogs exist specifically for the people who want a foodie discussion and not just an ingredients' list. Is it because blogs tend to have better recipes overall? In that case, isn't there a bit of entitlement involved in asking that the author self-sacrificingly provides only the information that you want, without taking care of their own needs and wants, also?
  - Loughla 5y ago
    It's the same thing that people always complain about. This thing is not in a format that I like, so it must be not what anyone likes. If you want JUST recipes, pay money instead of just randomly googling around. America's test kitchen has a billion, vetted, and really good recipes. That solves that problem.
  - joegahona 5y ago
    I think the complaint is that those blogs rank higher than nuts-and-bolts recipes now. It wasn't that way a few years ago. Yes, scrolling down the results to Food Network or Martha Stewart or whatever is possible, as is going directly to those sites and using their site search, but it's noticeable and annoying.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
      Not my experience. For a very quick test, I searched DDG for "omelette recipe, "carbonara recipe" and "peking duck recipe" (just to spice it up a bit) and all my top results are aggregators. Even "avgolemeono recipe" (which I'd think is very specialised) is aggregators on top. To be honest, I don't follow recipes when I cook unless it's a dish I've never had before. At that point what I want is to understand the point of the dish. A list of ingredients and preparation instructions don't tell me what it's supposed to taste and smell like. The foodie blogs at least try to create a certain... feeling of place, I suppose, some kind of impression that guides you when you cook. I wouldn't say it always works but I appreciate the effort. My real complaint with recipe writers is that they know how to cook one or two dishes well and they crib the rest off each other so even with all the information they provide, you still can't reliably cook a good meal from a recipe unless you've had the dish before. But that's my personal opinion.
- zerd 5y ago
  It's also because that's a way of trying to copyright protect recipes, which are normally not copyright protected. > “Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds, or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection. However, when a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection.”
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    But that copyright protection only extends to the literary expression. The recipe itself is still not covered by copyright, even if accompanied by an essay.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Searching for ‘chocolate’ on this search engine turned up a surprisingly large amount of chocolate based recipes.
Nextgrid 5y ago
I don't think the existing media-heavy websites are gaming Google to rank higher. It's that Google itself prefers media heavy content; they don't have to "game" anything. I also think a search engine like this would be quite hard to game. An ML-based classifier trained on thousands of text-heavy and media-heavy screenshots should be quite robust and I think would be very hard to evade, so the "game" will become more about how identify the crawler so you can serve it a high-ranking page while serving crap to the real users, and it seems fairly easily to defeat if the search engine does a second pass using residential proxies and standard browser user agents to detect this behavior (it could also threaten huge penalties like the entire domain being banned for a month to even deter attempts at this).
- fragmede 5y ago
  With the advances in text generation by machines that looks, but isn't quite accurate (aka GPT-3), seems like it would be easily gamed (given access to GPT-3). Even without GPT-3, if the content being prioritized is mere text, I'm sure that for a pile of money, I could generate something that looks like Wikipedia, in the sense that it's a giant pile of mostly text, but it would make zero sense to a human reader. (Building an SEO farm to boost ranking of not-wikpedia is left as an exercise for the reader.)
the_other 5y ago
If there were a wider variety of popular search engines, with different ranking criteria, would sites begin to move away from gaming the system? Surely it would be too hard to game more than one search engine at a time?
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  It would be a matter of numbers anyway about which they optimize for. A/B testing is already in place and doesn't care about where it comes from, just which one does better.
new_guy 5y ago
> the people who want to game it will appear. So just add human review to the mix, if a site is obviously trying to game the system (listicles, seo spam etc) just drop and ban them from the search index.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  Congratulations, you've just invented negative SEO.
phendrenad2 5y ago
There should be some perfect balance where this search engine is N% as popular as Google, where Google soaks up all of the gamifiers, but this search engine is still popular enough to derive revenue and do ML and other search-engine-useful stuff.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Specialization mostly a problem in monocultures. If you almost only plant wheat, you are going to end up with one hell of a pest problem. If you almost only have Windows XP, you are going to have one hell of a virus problem. If you almost only have SearchRank-style search engines (or just the one), you are going to have one hell of a content spam problem. Even though they have some pretty dodgy incentives, I don't think google suffers quality problems because they are evil, I think ultimately they suffer because they're so dominant. Whatever they do, the spammers adapt almost instantly. A diverse ecosystem on the other hand limits the viability of specialization by its very nature. If one actor is attacked, it shrinks and that reduces the opportunity for attacking it.

jandrese 5y ago

This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.

xtracto 5y ago
That's why I use Saffron [1], it magically converts those sites into a page in my recipe book. I found it when the developer commented here in HN. Also, a lot of cooking website have started to add a link with "jump to recipe" functionality allowing you to skip all the crap. [1] https://www.mysaffronapp.com/ https://www.mysaffronapp.com/
- Funes- 5y ago
  There's also https://based.cooking https://based.cooking.
  - eigengrau5150 5y ago
    Run by Luke Smith, an admitted neo-reactionary and possible white supremacist who writes like a 4chan reject.
ggggtez 5y ago
I've noticed this pattern start to pop up elsewhere. I've started to train my skimming skills, skipping a paragraph or two at a time to get past the fluff. Like an article about some current event will undoubtedly begin with "when I was traveling ten years ago...".
WorldMaker 5y ago
That sort of recipe blog hasn't happened just for SEO. It's also a bit of a "two audiences" problem: if you are coming to that food blogger from a search you certainly would prefer the recipe first and then maybe any commentary on it below if the recipe looks good. If you are a regular reader of that food blogger you are probably invested in the stories up top and that parasocial connection and the recipes themselves are sometimes incidental to why you are a regular reader. You see some of that "two readers" divide sometimes even in classic cookbooks, where "celebrity" chefs of the day might spend much of a cookbook on a long rambling memoir. Admittedly such books were generally well indexed and had table of contents to jump right to the recipes or particular recipes, but the concept of "long personal ramble of what these recipes mean to me" is an old one in cookbooks too.
- run-types 5y ago
  I've basically never been taken to a recipe without a rambling preamble from Google. While food blogs may serve two audiences, a long introduction seems to be a requirement to appear in the top Google search results.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Personally, I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that Google killed the Recipe Databases. There did used to be a few startups that tried to be Recipe Aggregators with advertising based business models, that would show recipes and then link to source blogs and/or cookbooks, and in the brief period where they existed Google scraped them entirely and showed entire recipes on search results and ate their ad revenue out from under them.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      That is a really bad thing by Google. Their core business is not recipes.
      - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
SerLava 5y ago
That's not really for SEO, which favors readily accessible information. That's ads. When mobile users have to scroll past 10 add, theyll click on some of them and make the blog money.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. I continue to be curious about this kind of complaint. If all you want is a recipe list, without any of the fluff, why would you click on a link to a blog, rather than on a link to a recipe aggregator? Foodie blogs exist specifically for the people who want a foodie discussion and not just an ingredients' list. Is it because blogs tend to have better recipes overall? In that case, isn't there a bit of entitlement involved in asking that the author self-sacrificingly provides only the information that you want, without taking care of their own needs and wants, also?
- Loughla 5y ago
  It's the same thing that people always complain about. This thing is not in a format that I like, so it must be not what anyone likes. If you want JUST recipes, pay money instead of just randomly googling around. America's test kitchen has a billion, vetted, and really good recipes. That solves that problem.
- joegahona 5y ago
  I think the complaint is that those blogs rank higher than nuts-and-bolts recipes now. It wasn't that way a few years ago. Yes, scrolling down the results to Food Network or Martha Stewart or whatever is possible, as is going directly to those sites and using their site search, but it's noticeable and annoying.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    Not my experience. For a very quick test, I searched DDG for "omelette recipe, "carbonara recipe" and "peking duck recipe" (just to spice it up a bit) and all my top results are aggregators. Even "avgolemeono recipe" (which I'd think is very specialised) is aggregators on top. To be honest, I don't follow recipes when I cook unless it's a dish I've never had before. At that point what I want is to understand the point of the dish. A list of ingredients and preparation instructions don't tell me what it's supposed to taste and smell like. The foodie blogs at least try to create a certain... feeling of place, I suppose, some kind of impression that guides you when you cook. I wouldn't say it always works but I appreciate the effort. My real complaint with recipe writers is that they know how to cook one or two dishes well and they crib the rest off each other so even with all the information they provide, you still can't reliably cook a good meal from a recipe unless you've had the dish before. But that's my personal opinion.
zerd 5y ago
It's also because that's a way of trying to copyright protect recipes, which are normally not copyright protected. > “Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds, or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection. However, when a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection.”
- JohnFen 5y ago
  But that copyright protection only extends to the literary expression. The recipe itself is still not covered by copyright, even if accompanied by an essay.
Aeolun 5y ago
Searching for ‘chocolate’ on this search engine turned up a surprisingly large amount of chocolate based recipes.

Nextgrid 5y ago

I don't think the existing media-heavy websites are gaming Google to rank higher. It's that Google itself prefers media heavy content; they don't have to "game" anything. I also think a search engine like this would be quite hard to game. An ML-based classifier trained on thousands of text-heavy and media-heavy screenshots should be quite robust and I think would be very hard to evade, so the "game" will become more about how identify the crawler so you can serve it a high-ranking page while serving crap to the real users, and it seems fairly easily to defeat if the search engine does a second pass using residential proxies and standard browser user agents to detect this behavior (it could also threaten huge penalties like the entire domain being banned for a month to even deter attempts at this).

fragmede 5y ago
With the advances in text generation by machines that looks, but isn't quite accurate (aka GPT-3), seems like it would be easily gamed (given access to GPT-3). Even without GPT-3, if the content being prioritized is mere text, I'm sure that for a pile of money, I could generate something that looks like Wikipedia, in the sense that it's a giant pile of mostly text, but it would make zero sense to a human reader. (Building an SEO farm to boost ranking of not-wikpedia is left as an exercise for the reader.)

the_other 5y ago

If there were a wider variety of popular search engines, with different ranking criteria, would sites begin to move away from gaming the system? Surely it would be too hard to game more than one search engine at a time?

Nasrudith 5y ago
It would be a matter of numbers anyway about which they optimize for. A/B testing is already in place and doesn't care about where it comes from, just which one does better.

new_guy 5y ago

> the people who want to game it will appear. So just add human review to the mix, if a site is obviously trying to game the system (listicles, seo spam etc) just drop and ban them from the search index.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Congratulations, you've just invented negative SEO.

phendrenad2 5y ago

There should be some perfect balance where this search engine is N% as popular as Google, where Google soaks up all of the gamifiers, but this search engine is still popular enough to derive revenue and do ML and other search-engine-useful stuff.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Specialization mostly a problem in monocultures. If you almost only plant wheat, you are going to end up with one hell of a pest problem. If you almost only have Windows XP, you are going to have one hell of a virus problem. If you almost only have SearchRank-style search engines (or just the one), you are going to have one hell of a content spam problem. Even though they have some pretty dodgy incentives, I don't think google suffers quality problems because they are evil, I think ultimately they suffer because they're so dominant. Whatever they do, the spammers adapt almost instantly. A diverse ecosystem on the other hand limits the viability of specialization by its very nature. If one actor is attacked, it shrinks and that reduces the opportunity for attacking it.