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What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in

What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - anyone who has searched for recipes also knows that Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page and show it alongside the results. Which is obviously meaningless because comparing 4.5 stars from grandmas-cooking.net to 4.5 stars from foodnetwork.com is apples-to-oranges. So what's to stop me from simply faking my own star system, then presenting it on my website so that google picks it up in its results? And what triggers Google to look for a star rating? Could I update my tech blog to have a star rating and Google will show it? Or is it limited to keywords like "recipe"?

jordansmith 5y ago
They goal of a recipe website is to get ad revenue. Top tier ad networks won’t accept your site if it’s just straight up recipes so you need to have the padding to get approved. And it increases the amount of ads you can squeeze onto the page for higher RPMs
Rygian 5y ago
The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright law. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at least databases - even if they solely consist of trivial, non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was put into place after a company in Germany just hired people to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages, and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least now).
  - anamax 5y ago
    In the US, the facts in a phone book (names, numbers, addresses) are not copyrightable and neither is the collection. However, see the bit at the end about compilations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers, addresses) are copyrightable. If they are, they can be used to give copyright protection to a collection even when the bulk of the collection isn't copyrightable.
    - littlecranky67 5y ago
      Those fake facts are a thing and have a name [0], they are placed into phonebooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias etc. to detect copyright violations (i.e. somebody else stealing your compilation). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
      - whiddershins 5y ago
        And maps.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers, addresses) are copyrightable. This has, unfortunately, been upheld on occasion. True damages from copying such false entries would be nonexistent, naturally, but statutory damages are blind to such trivialities as justice or proportionality. Morally speaking, anything presented as fact (including entries in a phone book or notations on a map) should be treated as fact and thus not copyrightable. Something along the lines of estoppel should prevent one from claiming that they are providing a database of facts and then suing the recipient for reproducing copyrightable "creative elements" which don't belong there. Also, selling someone a database of "facts" with deliberate fictitious entries mixed in which are not specifically labeled as such should be classified as fraud and open the publisher up to liability should anyone suffer the slightest harm due to the false entries.
  - 5y ago
- pfranz 5y ago
  I always see this as a stated reason, but I'm skeptical unless it's cargo-culting like "no copyright intended" on YouTube videos (but this is a lot more work). I can't see Adam and Joanne [1] or Holly [2] suing for copyright because when someone stole their Frito Pie recipe and left off the story at top. Especially, when they both have Google-defined tags to grab only the recipe and ingredients. As others have mentioned, the bigger sites (Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc.) tend not do the story thing. Do you have any other info on copyright as a reason? [1] https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-recipe/ https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-r... [2] https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ [3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
- walligatorrr 5y ago
  Interesting but this app doesn’t seem to be having a hard time scraping and publishing the recipe material without copyright.
joshgachnang 5y ago
People scroll more, so higher engagement and lower bounce rate metrics with the site (which I think helps with search ranking)
seanhunter 5y ago
My understanding is there are 3 reasons. 1)The authors want to build a brand for themselves rather than just provide you with recipes. This helps to get further opportunities for them and differentiates their cookbook/site from others in a very crowded market 2)A lot of people read cookbooks as books rather than just when they are cooking and this philosophy seems to have been copied over to recipe sites 3)Copyright. Istr reading somewhere you can't copyright a recipe whereas you can pursue a claim against someone who plagiarises the non-obvious text parts. It's something like that.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  The "listing of ingredients" and "simple set of directions" are not copyrightable in the US (I have no idea about other countries). Photographs, drawings, and background info such as explanations of how or why the recipe works may all be copyrightable though. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
rjzzleep 5y ago
1. SEO. I've been recommended to have a ghostwriter write technical articles for me to increase my client base. Build enough of a cult following and you can be sure that your youtube channel, or next book has enough of an audience. 2. I think it also appeals to a certain audience. It makes them feel open minded to other cultures. There's an emotional bond forming with the story or the people in the story. Don't forget that the average american speaks only one language, yet considers themselves as part of the country that is creating/keeping world peace and that at the same time the average american consumer spends more on average on consumer goods per capita than any other nation in the world. Add to that, that ad revenue is the US is also disproportionately higher than anywhere else.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I have literally never met anyone express (2). Any time anyone needs a recipe site they immediately start complaining about it, unprompted.
  - MartinCron 5y ago
    My wife and I collect cookbooks and cocktail recipe books. There are a handful of writers who have a compelling voice where I read more than just the ingredient list and instructions. But for some random blog that I find while googling? Never.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    Smitten Kitchen often has a few paragraphs before the recipe. I don't always read it, but I also don't hate it. It helps she writes well and it seems to genuinely reflect the author's life--I think it started out as a personal blog with occasional recipes before becoming a recipe site with bloggy bits bolted on. The text is also fairly helpful, in that it sometimes describes less successful attempts cooking the same thing, or compares it with other dishes ("If you hate X, try [this] instead"). This may be a rare exception though--I agree that a lot of other recipe sites have tons of vacuous filler.
    - 5y ago
nerdjon 5y ago
My best possible guesses (note, not really based on any research into it but just theories). - The ones that I have noticed do this, also tend to have a lot of ads. So maybe to both be able to show more ads (there is a limit of how many ads you can show if you just have a simple recipe, but add a book above it and you can show many more). Maybe also the ability to add referral links to talked about products? - It seems like some of them are trying to build a community. They do the whole "tell me about your experience" thing that only generates more page views and "interaction". So maybe there are people that actually follow these blogs and feel like all of that story is personal? - I am sure there is some SEO stuff going on here like others have said.
password1 5y ago
It's SEO. Once a SEO expert was showing me user heatmaps on his popular website's articles. The users completely ignored 90% of the content and of the text of a page. I asked him why so many parts of the text were ignored by the users and his answer was "oh, that text is not for the users, it's for google". The literally paid writers to write articles way longer than needed solely to satisfy Google algorithms. The worst part is that it worked and they earned a lot of money from it.
- gamerDude 5y ago
  If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?
  - hysan 5y ago
    Placing recipes on the bottom and behind “click to show” type features forces users to remain on your site for a longer period of time. This makes it appear to Google that users are more “engaged” on your website because it takes longer for them to bounce in the cases where the recipe isn’t what they are looking for.
  - csa 5y ago
    > If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below? From an SEO perspective, yes. Time spent on page will be less if the recipe is on the top.
    - shoulderfake 5y ago
      Such bs. I rarely spend more than 20s on a recipe page anyways. I scroll quickly to find ingredients box and thats it. Done...
      - rovr138 5y ago
        ...How do you follow the recipe? Or are we talking simple recipes where the steps are simple?
elwell 5y ago
> Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page and show it alongside the results Recipe Schema: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... Yes, you can totally fake the # of stars & rating.
floatrock 5y ago
Because "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the rich media carousel previews, etc. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... If you want to know what categories of things will have especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results, look at the other things that google encourages developers to semantically tag and compete for use of the shiny results page features. A couple interesting ones: Ecommerce (monetizable sales): - Books - Review snippet - Software app - Events Google Maps data ingestion: - Local Business Youtube previews: - Video - Movie Job search: - Employer Aggregate Rating - Estimated salary - Job Posting Knowledge graph: - COVID-19 announcements (ooo, topical!) - Dataset - FAQ - Fact Check Recipes are something that people who search for recipes do several times a week, so the algorithms identified this as a Thing with High DAU's. Semantic tags then makes it easier to identify "this is a recipe page", but that means for such a crowded category it's a race to the bottom with optimization and ad-stuffing (more life story == more inline ad blocks). Unfortunately, it's against google's interest to promote to-the-point recipe pages that have fewer embedded AdWords blocks. Projects like OP probably just parse out the semantic tags and throw away the rest of the content. This could easily be a browser extension.
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to test: "pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent: https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ "lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good: https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ "sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads you see and I can't judge the quality as well, buy at least the sites are quite usable. I'd be more pissed off by a missing ingredient than having to scroll a screen or two.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
shoulderfake 5y ago
Man I was wondering this same thing. Every single stupid recipe site is just terrible ux. Just show the recipe we don't care about the story.
_ttg 5y ago
It's Google SEO, as others have pointed out. A pretty insightful look into the incentives in this article - https://www.protocol.com/tech-vs-food-bloggers https://www.protocol.com/tech-vs-food-bloggers
yhorawu8 5y ago
zhte415 5y ago
I also see similar WordPress themes appear on supposedly independent sites with individual authors. Similar down to the email sign-up popups. I get that some WP themes are more popular than the bazillion available, but the consistency in look and feel between a Malaysian immigrant to New York cooking curries I know aren't that Malaysian and a stay at home mom in Ohio doing baking that may have been passed down by a great aunt that tweaked a King Arthur Flour recipe is often remarkable.
- kixiQu 5y ago
  If you don't feel comfortable/confident getting into the code/markup to customize, you're probably going to pick something that looks "right" to you, which is then determined by what you see. Doesn't seem super remarkable to me?
ethbr0 5y ago
> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? As a child growing up outside of Atlanta, this is how we were typically taught recipes. "One day, when you're sharing this recipe on a mass communication network that doesn't exist today, make sure to (1) mention that you're from Atlanta & (2) include a story about your children / partner / family." I guess, maybe it's different elsewhere?
danielvaughn 5y ago
Exactly. I've never been as frustrated with the modern web as I am when I try to find a recipe. It's the most infuriating experience. I'd pay money if I knew I could access a very large database of recipes, where I know I just get the recipe itself.
- guynamedloren 5y ago
  It's an infuriating experience indeed. I reached my breaking point a few months ago, and decided I was just done with googling recipes. After trying a few different highly regarded paid apps (recipe managers, NYT Cooking) and not finding quite what I was looking for, I caved and started compiling my own recipe database in Notion. My goal is to use this database exclusively for weekly meal planning, as well as for cooking up something on a whim. It's a habit change for sure, and required a bit of upfront work to seed the database, but so far, has proved to be successful. Overall, both meal planning and cooking itself have become more enjoyable!
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Ratings for recipes never make sense anyway because if one reads the reviews they're always of the sort, "I LOVE THIS RECIPE! I used buttermilk instead of Milk, doubled the sugar, used almond extract instead of vanilla. This recipe is AMAZING!"
- bluGill 5y ago
  Those reviews are more useful that the recipes. If I am missing one ingredient I have more confidence in trying a substitute if someone else has before me (I've messed a few recipes up with a bad substitute). sometimes I'll look at the substitution and think that sounds better even though I have everything for the original (if I've made this before I'm more likely to do this for variety).
  - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    The problem is once you change the ingredients, you're not making the same recipe. Sure the alternatives may turn out better, but rate the original a 1 star and then list what changes you made.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Why would I rate the original 1 star? I didn't make it so I have no knowledge about it, or I like it and I like this modifications.
bluGill 5y ago
I've learned to only click on allrecipes.com all the others make it too hard to find the recipe I'm looking for. Please join me in rewarding the one good site that works. (note, the parent company was bought out this summer, the new owners may screw things up, if so punish them like all the others where you can't find the recipe)
johnfn 5y ago
Google weights time spent on site in rankings. If you bounce instantly back to the search results, obviously you didn’t find what you were looking for. If you stay for a while, maybe you did.
giaour 5y ago
> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? > My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Cookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text for every recipe. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to make it. The only cookbook I own that doesn't have intro text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with the terms and techniques used. OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional cookbooks. Contemporary food blogs tend to try to emulate older, successful blogs (maybe because Google somehow boosted recipes with intro text back when such text was usually helpful?) but mostly come off as AI-generated garbage text, made just long enough to create a couple scroll events and artificially lower a site's bounce rate.
avaika 5y ago
It's not just recipes. There are tones of questions I often search which have a very specific and short answer. E.g. "how many kangaroos are there in the world?". Ideally I would expect a page with my question and a number with link to the source. However in the real world I get various pages with somehow related title and tons of text inside I don't need. Often times without the exact number I'm looking for. I guess that most likely nobody wants to maintain such a resource since it might be hard to make it profitable. Still it might save a lot of time for collective humanity.
foofoo4u 5y ago
Its annoying to me too. A lot of fluff. From what I remember, back around 2012, Google was facing a serious issue of content farms appearing in their results. These are sites that aggregate data and auto-generate articles about a myriad of topics. They were ruining search. So Google introduced a significant change to the way that they rank websites. They figured originality and authenticity was the key to identifying genuine sites. And how was this determined? Well, an article is written, it should contain a lot of text, more so and of better quality than an algorithm could write. And the content had to be original. If it was clear that the content was copy and pasted from somewhere else, then it was probably not original. So here we are, where a simple recipe has to tell the person's life story in order differentiate it from the junk of content farms. I am sure someone here remembers this Google change back then. It had a specific name. Everyone on the web who was concerned about SEO at the time was aware of it.

jordansmith 5y ago

They goal of a recipe website is to get ad revenue. Top tier ad networks won’t accept your site if it’s just straight up recipes so you need to have the padding to get approved. And it increases the amount of ads you can squeeze onto the page for higher RPMs

Rygian 5y ago

The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright law. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/

littlecranky67 5y ago
Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at least databases - even if they solely consist of trivial, non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was put into place after a company in Germany just hired people to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages, and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least now).
- anamax 5y ago
  In the US, the facts in a phone book (names, numbers, addresses) are not copyrightable and neither is the collection. However, see the bit at the end about compilations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers, addresses) are copyrightable. If they are, they can be used to give copyright protection to a collection even when the bulk of the collection isn't copyrightable.
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    Those fake facts are a thing and have a name [0], they are placed into phonebooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias etc. to detect copyright violations (i.e. somebody else stealing your compilation). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
    - whiddershins 5y ago
      And maps.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers, addresses) are copyrightable. This has, unfortunately, been upheld on occasion. True damages from copying such false entries would be nonexistent, naturally, but statutory damages are blind to such trivialities as justice or proportionality. Morally speaking, anything presented as fact (including entries in a phone book or notations on a map) should be treated as fact and thus not copyrightable. Something along the lines of estoppel should prevent one from claiming that they are providing a database of facts and then suing the recipient for reproducing copyrightable "creative elements" which don't belong there. Also, selling someone a database of "facts" with deliberate fictitious entries mixed in which are not specifically labeled as such should be classified as fraud and open the publisher up to liability should anyone suffer the slightest harm due to the false entries.
- 5y ago
pfranz 5y ago
I always see this as a stated reason, but I'm skeptical unless it's cargo-culting like "no copyright intended" on YouTube videos (but this is a lot more work). I can't see Adam and Joanne [1] or Holly [2] suing for copyright because when someone stole their Frito Pie recipe and left off the story at top. Especially, when they both have Google-defined tags to grab only the recipe and ingredients. As others have mentioned, the bigger sites (Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc.) tend not do the story thing. Do you have any other info on copyright as a reason? [1] https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-recipe/ https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-r... [2] https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ [3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
walligatorrr 5y ago
Interesting but this app doesn’t seem to be having a hard time scraping and publishing the recipe material without copyright.

joshgachnang 5y ago

People scroll more, so higher engagement and lower bounce rate metrics with the site (which I think helps with search ranking)

seanhunter 5y ago

My understanding is there are 3 reasons. 1)The authors want to build a brand for themselves rather than just provide you with recipes. This helps to get further opportunities for them and differentiates their cookbook/site from others in a very crowded market 2)A lot of people read cookbooks as books rather than just when they are cooking and this philosophy seems to have been copied over to recipe sites 3)Copyright. Istr reading somewhere you can't copyright a recipe whereas you can pursue a claim against someone who plagiarises the non-obvious text parts. It's something like that.

technothrasher 5y ago
The "listing of ingredients" and "simple set of directions" are not copyrightable in the US (I have no idea about other countries). Photographs, drawings, and background info such as explanations of how or why the recipe works may all be copyrightable though. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

rjzzleep 5y ago

1. SEO. I've been recommended to have a ghostwriter write technical articles for me to increase my client base. Build enough of a cult following and you can be sure that your youtube channel, or next book has enough of an audience. 2. I think it also appeals to a certain audience. It makes them feel open minded to other cultures. There's an emotional bond forming with the story or the people in the story. Don't forget that the average american speaks only one language, yet considers themselves as part of the country that is creating/keeping world peace and that at the same time the average american consumer spends more on average on consumer goods per capita than any other nation in the world. Add to that, that ad revenue is the US is also disproportionately higher than anywhere else.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
I have literally never met anyone express (2). Any time anyone needs a recipe site they immediately start complaining about it, unprompted.
- MartinCron 5y ago
  My wife and I collect cookbooks and cocktail recipe books. There are a handful of writers who have a compelling voice where I read more than just the ingredient list and instructions. But for some random blog that I find while googling? Never.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  Smitten Kitchen often has a few paragraphs before the recipe. I don't always read it, but I also don't hate it. It helps she writes well and it seems to genuinely reflect the author's life--I think it started out as a personal blog with occasional recipes before becoming a recipe site with bloggy bits bolted on. The text is also fairly helpful, in that it sometimes describes less successful attempts cooking the same thing, or compares it with other dishes ("If you hate X, try [this] instead"). This may be a rare exception though--I agree that a lot of other recipe sites have tons of vacuous filler.
  - 5y ago

nerdjon 5y ago

My best possible guesses (note, not really based on any research into it but just theories). - The ones that I have noticed do this, also tend to have a lot of ads. So maybe to both be able to show more ads (there is a limit of how many ads you can show if you just have a simple recipe, but add a book above it and you can show many more). Maybe also the ability to add referral links to talked about products? - It seems like some of them are trying to build a community. They do the whole "tell me about your experience" thing that only generates more page views and "interaction". So maybe there are people that actually follow these blogs and feel like all of that story is personal? - I am sure there is some SEO stuff going on here like others have said.

password1 5y ago

It's SEO. Once a SEO expert was showing me user heatmaps on his popular website's articles. The users completely ignored 90% of the content and of the text of a page. I asked him why so many parts of the text were ignored by the users and his answer was "oh, that text is not for the users, it's for google". The literally paid writers to write articles way longer than needed solely to satisfy Google algorithms. The worst part is that it worked and they earned a lot of money from it.

gamerDude 5y ago
If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?
- hysan 5y ago
  Placing recipes on the bottom and behind “click to show” type features forces users to remain on your site for a longer period of time. This makes it appear to Google that users are more “engaged” on your website because it takes longer for them to bounce in the cases where the recipe isn’t what they are looking for.
- csa 5y ago
  > If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below? From an SEO perspective, yes. Time spent on page will be less if the recipe is on the top.
  - shoulderfake 5y ago
    Such bs. I rarely spend more than 20s on a recipe page anyways. I scroll quickly to find ingredients box and thats it. Done...
    - rovr138 5y ago
      ...How do you follow the recipe? Or are we talking simple recipes where the steps are simple?

elwell 5y ago

> Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page and show it alongside the results Recipe Schema: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... Yes, you can totally fake the # of stars & rating.

floatrock 5y ago

Because "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the rich media carousel previews, etc. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... If you want to know what categories of things will have especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results, look at the other things that google encourages developers to semantically tag and compete for use of the shiny results page features. A couple interesting ones: Ecommerce (monetizable sales): - Books - Review snippet - Software app - Events Google Maps data ingestion: - Local Business Youtube previews: - Video - Movie Job search: - Employer Aggregate Rating - Estimated salary - Job Posting Knowledge graph: - COVID-19 announcements (ooo, topical!) - Dataset - FAQ - Fact Check Recipes are something that people who search for recipes do several times a week, so the algorithms identified this as a Thing with High DAU's. Semantic tags then makes it easier to identify "this is a recipe page", but that means for such a crowded category it's a race to the bottom with optimization and ad-stuffing (more life story == more inline ad blocks). Unfortunately, it's against google's interest to promote to-the-point recipe pages that have fewer embedded AdWords blocks. Projects like OP probably just parse out the semantic tags and throw away the rest of the content. This could easily be a browser extension.

tiborsaas 5y ago
I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to test: "pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent: https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ "lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good: https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ "sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads you see and I can't judge the quality as well, buy at least the sites are quite usable. I'd be more pissed off by a missing ingredient than having to scroll a screen or two.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

shoulderfake 5y ago

Man I was wondering this same thing. Every single stupid recipe site is just terrible ux. Just show the recipe we don't care about the story.

_ttg 5y ago

It's Google SEO, as others have pointed out. A pretty insightful look into the incentives in this article - https://www.protocol.com/tech-vs-food-bloggers https://www.protocol.com/tech-vs-food-bloggers

yhorawu8 5y ago

zhte415 5y ago

I also see similar WordPress themes appear on supposedly independent sites with individual authors. Similar down to the email sign-up popups. I get that some WP themes are more popular than the bazillion available, but the consistency in look and feel between a Malaysian immigrant to New York cooking curries I know aren't that Malaysian and a stay at home mom in Ohio doing baking that may have been passed down by a great aunt that tweaked a King Arthur Flour recipe is often remarkable.

kixiQu 5y ago
If you don't feel comfortable/confident getting into the code/markup to customize, you're probably going to pick something that looks "right" to you, which is then determined by what you see. Doesn't seem super remarkable to me?

ethbr0 5y ago

> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? As a child growing up outside of Atlanta, this is how we were typically taught recipes. "One day, when you're sharing this recipe on a mass communication network that doesn't exist today, make sure to (1) mention that you're from Atlanta & (2) include a story about your children / partner / family." I guess, maybe it's different elsewhere?

danielvaughn 5y ago

Exactly. I've never been as frustrated with the modern web as I am when I try to find a recipe. It's the most infuriating experience. I'd pay money if I knew I could access a very large database of recipes, where I know I just get the recipe itself.

guynamedloren 5y ago
It's an infuriating experience indeed. I reached my breaking point a few months ago, and decided I was just done with googling recipes. After trying a few different highly regarded paid apps (recipe managers, NYT Cooking) and not finding quite what I was looking for, I caved and started compiling my own recipe database in Notion. My goal is to use this database exclusively for weekly meal planning, as well as for cooking up something on a whim. It's a habit change for sure, and required a bit of upfront work to seed the database, but so far, has proved to be successful. Overall, both meal planning and cooking itself have become more enjoyable!

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

Ratings for recipes never make sense anyway because if one reads the reviews they're always of the sort, "I LOVE THIS RECIPE! I used buttermilk instead of Milk, doubled the sugar, used almond extract instead of vanilla. This recipe is AMAZING!"

bluGill 5y ago
Those reviews are more useful that the recipes. If I am missing one ingredient I have more confidence in trying a substitute if someone else has before me (I've messed a few recipes up with a bad substitute). sometimes I'll look at the substitution and think that sounds better even though I have everything for the original (if I've made this before I'm more likely to do this for variety).
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  The problem is once you change the ingredients, you're not making the same recipe. Sure the alternatives may turn out better, but rate the original a 1 star and then list what changes you made.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Why would I rate the original 1 star? I didn't make it so I have no knowledge about it, or I like it and I like this modifications.

bluGill 5y ago

I've learned to only click on allrecipes.com all the others make it too hard to find the recipe I'm looking for. Please join me in rewarding the one good site that works. (note, the parent company was bought out this summer, the new owners may screw things up, if so punish them like all the others where you can't find the recipe)

johnfn 5y ago

Google weights time spent on site in rankings. If you bounce instantly back to the search results, obviously you didn’t find what you were looking for. If you stay for a while, maybe you did.

giaour 5y ago

> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? > My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Cookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text for every recipe. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to make it. The only cookbook I own that doesn't have intro text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with the terms and techniques used. OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional cookbooks. Contemporary food blogs tend to try to emulate older, successful blogs (maybe because Google somehow boosted recipes with intro text back when such text was usually helpful?) but mostly come off as AI-generated garbage text, made just long enough to create a couple scroll events and artificially lower a site's bounce rate.

avaika 5y ago

It's not just recipes. There are tones of questions I often search which have a very specific and short answer. E.g. "how many kangaroos are there in the world?". Ideally I would expect a page with my question and a number with link to the source. However in the real world I get various pages with somehow related title and tons of text inside I don't need. Often times without the exact number I'm looking for. I guess that most likely nobody wants to maintain such a resource since it might be hard to make it profitable. Still it might save a lot of time for collective humanity.

foofoo4u 5y ago

Its annoying to me too. A lot of fluff. From what I remember, back around 2012, Google was facing a serious issue of content farms appearing in their results. These are sites that aggregate data and auto-generate articles about a myriad of topics. They were ruining search. So Google introduced a significant change to the way that they rank websites. They figured originality and authenticity was the key to identifying genuine sites. And how was this determined? Well, an article is written, it should contain a lot of text, more so and of better quality than an algorithm could write. And the content had to be original. If it was clear that the content was copy and pasted from somewhere else, then it was probably not original. So here we are, where a simple recipe has to tell the person's life story in order differentiate it from the junk of content farms. I am sure someone here remembers this Google change back then. It had a specific name. Everyone on the web who was concerned about SEO at the time was aware of it.