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Thanks Google. Now can we fix the recipes pages please. No one wants the back story for the "the best brownies", I want to know the ingredients, cooking temps
by rawoke083600 4y ago
Thanks Google.
Now can we fix the recipes pages please.
No one wants the back story for the "the best brownies", I want to know the ingredients, cooking temps (Celsius and Fahrenheit) and time.
- yunohn 4y agoGoogle doesn’t write recipes, dedicated and passionate cooks write blogs with recipes in them. I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing their story as well. They’re building their own cookbook essentially, not a bunch of lists.
- swiftcoder 4y agoOr, more likely, they are just SEO optimising by providing a lot of prose (which Google has historically prioritised in search rankings) - the same way as all those AI-generated article summaries on the astroturfing sites
- yunohn 4y agoHow do you propose anyone (Google or humans) differentiate between 500 mostly-similar recipes for brownies? I think HNers look at food blogs with a very depressing robotic expectation.
- rawoke083600 4y agoHow is picking the one with the longest word count the best ??
- swiftcoder 4y agoThis is what algorithms like PageRank were originally designed to do. Once upon a time the popular brownie recipes are the ones that everyone linked to, or the ones on the cooking sites that everyone linked to. To be clear, I don't really care if the person wants to put their life story on their recipe site. I am annoyed that they are forced to do so in a really mechanical and disingenuous way just to make a Google algorithm happy - and as a result I lean heavily on the recipe sites that have alternate marketing channels/revenue streams (i.e. Serious Eats, ChefSteps, etc)
- Andys 4y agoI am sorry, but I believe you are mistaken. Recipe sharing worked one way for all of history until it became profitable to game the search engines by adding story-like content.
- yunohn 4y agoCould you source anything that proves this? I’ve always seen personalised stories with recipes, save for barebones websites that are aggregators and not personal blogs. Maybe consider food writing the same as technical writing? Nobody wants to read a dev blog with just snippets of code, they want the story too!
- rawoke083600 4y agoimagine stackoverflow came with a backstory when you googled "javascript http post" ! Same with "best brownies recipe"
- yunohn 4y agoThere are lots of recipe aggregators that are similar to your stackoverflow needs. You should compare a dev blog post to a food blog.
- rawoke083600 4y ago@yunohn ? You think ppl searching for 'food blog stories outweighs' the people searching for food recipes? Im honesty asking since. In my mind (i could very well be wrong). I. would think there are more ppl interested in 'how to make Great brownies' , then there are ppl searching for 'the backstory of the great brownie recipe' ? Yet the results i get from my searches are more inline with if i searched for backstory of recipes. Hell maybe im just searching with the wrong keywords ??
- yunohn 4y agoNo, I’m saying Google doesn’t make the internet. Content creators want to add their own story and vibe to a simple recipe. You are free to use recipe aggregators that don’t, or make your own content?
- equalsione 4y agoI _think_ OP is referring to the fact that most sites are forced into writing really long form posts because the format is "encouraged" by Google. I don't know the ins and outs but my understanding is that if you don't follow the Google format then you recipe drops way down in Google search results.
- mikro2nd 4y agoNo, they're forced into long form posts because recipes cannot be copyrighted. By adding a story you get something with copy rights.
- Kbelicius 4y agoIANAL but wouldn't you just get a copyright on the story and somebody could still extract all the necessary information for preparing the meal and publish it as a simple recipe?
- mikro2nd 4y agoIANAL either, but I believe that, yes, you could do just that. Of course you'd not have any copyright... :) TBH I'm not entirely clear why the issue is so important to the people who publish these things, but clearly it is!
- rchaud 4y agoWhy would they care about copyright? The sites these recipes sit on are ad-funded. Copyright would matter if they were selling these as books, not for free online where anybody can copy it, save it as a PDF etc.
- bspammer 4y agoGoogle created the incentives that led to the current state of recipe pages.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Shorel 4y agoAnd with the possibility of having the measures in metric. Otherwise, it is almost useless for most of the world.
- addandsubtract 4y agoI like how you said "possibility", as if 3/8th of a cup wasn't a good enough measurement.
- Shorel 4y agoNo, it is not a good measurement. I have cups of many sizes.
- rawoke083600 4y agoLol cant tell if you serious or trying to get my temper up to 75 Farhenheit :p
- rawoke083600 4y agoExactly ! I feel double mad when reading metrics/measurements in non metric format 1) Im mad cause now i need to google a convert query and author assumes the world is only full of U.S.A ppl 2) Mad cause I should know approximate conversion value, since I *think/claim" to be not a stupid person. Both of the are usually false, in my case at least
- planb 4y agoI feel like these "back stories" will get even more important for a high ranking if Google prioritizes "content by people, for people"