14 ms·

Why are online recipes so long-winded?

163 points by 4monthsaway 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago
The real reason is because recipes consisting of just the list of ingredients can't be copyrighted, but the articles and all the other stuff are copyrightable.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  A couple paragraphs ought to be enough to make it copyrightable.
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    Ingredients lists and basic instructions ("place potatoes in boiling water") are not copyrightable. Only the additional text is copyrightable. This has long been a 'problem' for cookbook writers and chefs. Unlike cookbooks, blogs have no particular constraints on how much text they can add, and as pointed out here, perverse incentives to add lots of extraneous material.
- brians 4y ago
  I don’t see this. If somebody’s scraped just the recipes from all these long winded sites, I’d be thrilled! Adding the extra nonsense and narrative doesn’t prevent that. The reason is SEO; this is Google’s fault.
  - tomstockmail 4y ago
    There's https://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/ (I am not affiliated with it)
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
SEO.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- k2enemy 4y ago
  I also wonder how much of it is a perception among the blog authors that they have to make their recipes long winded for SEO reasons. They see everyone else doing it, there's an information cascade, and they believe (perhaps incorrectly) that they also must do it.
  - VLM 4y ago
    There's a link to a PDF here from google itself. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en I suppose you could have a "conspiracy theory" level argument that Google publishes what it claims it will do only to turn around and do the opposite, but that seems unlikely. Unfortunately if you publish guidelines that you'll promote pages that are not auto-generated DB dumps, and prefer pages that promote the idea the author put in a lot of effort and is highly authoritative and E-E-A-T and all that you can read in the guidelines, you're going to get generic recipes wrapped in a VERY thick blanket of fake filler, good enough to fool the average reader (whom doesn't read very well) but ridiculously inadequate compared to where the pros and semi-pros operate.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Speaking as someone who likes to cook, and hates wading through pages of SEO bait to find the actual recipe, it seems like in principle it wouldn't be too hard to write a search engine specialized for recipes that heavily penalizes longwindedness.
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ ?
  - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    bookmarked, thanks
  - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    Made the cod chowder last night. Came out great, but there's one thing I noticed: the recipe didn't specify how much water or salt to use. I eyeballed it and it came out fine, but that probably wouldn't work for something touchier like baked goods.
    - worldofmatthew 4y ago
      Maybe look at adding a merge request on github?
epr 4y ago
4. Copyright protection does not apply to recipes themselves, but does apply to the fluff. IANAL
barrkel 4y ago
Sometimes they could still do with more detail, especially when using imprecise imperial measurements. The one that I find most irritating is using volume measurements for non-liquids, e.g. cup of flour (sifted or not?), or ratios, where it's not specified if it's a weight:weight or volume:volume ratio.
kspacewalk2 4y ago
You can try plainoldrecipe.com[0] for de-cluttering recipes. It doesn't work for a lot of the bloggy recipe sites, but when it does[1], it's great. And it works for all the popular sites like AllRecipes. [0] https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ [1] https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spendwithpennies.com%2Feasy-quiche-recipe%2F https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spen...
- gaudat 4y ago
  Also see this crowdsourced alternative. If there are cooks on HN you can send a pull request to add your receipe. https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Was going to comment this, but figured someone had to have already.
    - Eupraxias 4y ago
      Was going to ask someone to post it because I couldn't find the link anymore!
- twh270 4y ago
  There's also the app CopyMeThat, which will capture recipes from darn near anything, let you tag and otherwise organize them, let you make a mealplan, and more. We have 3000+ recipes in it now (of which we've made probably a couple hundred lol).
macinjosh 4y ago
1. People like to talk/write/blab 2. Keywords and content for SEO 3. Some bloggers plan on compiling their posts into a cookbook
- WilTimSon 4y ago
  Now I can screenshot this and make a post "Why Are Answers That Aren't On HN So Long-Winded?", because you recapped the whole thing in 3 sentences.
gnarbarian 4y ago
I would love to see a crowdsourced cookbook with user submitted variations on recipes and vote ranking and comments. search by ingredients, dish, macros, calories. create meal plans, meal prep, shopping lists. then you can integrate with grocery store apis to pick up your shopping list or have it delivered with Instacart. there are lots of avenues for monetization but it's a crowded space and hard to build all these features in and gain momentum.
- abhijeetpbodas 4y ago
  https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
  - killtheweb 4y ago
    [dead]
  - gnarbarian 4y ago
    I love this and I will use it but it's missing the key features I described around meal plans with nutrient targets and shopping lists.
- tayo42 4y ago
  My little dream project is to build a yelp for recipes. Books, internet or custom from users. I don't like Google results and also don't think search engines should be the place to find a good recipe or judge quality or authencity etc..
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  That's what sites like allrecipes.com have been doing for years and years.
s1mon 4y ago
Searching for recipes turns out to be a great use for ChatGPT. You can give it pretty fuzzy search parameters and have conversations about adjusting the recipes and it will just give you a simple list of ingredients and instructions - no BS. Conversely, if you do want to use regular searches and recipes from internet sites, the Paprika app [0] is amazing. It will download and parse the recipes and get rid of all the BS. You can then sync recipes between devices and people as well as manage grocery lists and meal plans based on the recipes. [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/
- _yb2s 4y ago
  If you trust it not to 'hallucinate' a bad recipe no one would actually want to make.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
I've noticed a similar pattern in search results regarding anime series release dates. The main difference being that those anime articles seem entirely generated from templates.
Ekaros 4y ago
I would honestly guess that the blog text is point of the process and not the recipe for many of the writers. Maybe the recipe is just there to justify the process of writing the blog post. Or they would eventually be asked for the recipe, so get away having to repeatedly answer to same question.
bojangleslover 4y ago
https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/
destroy-2A 4y ago
Chat gpt is perfect for this you can add any variation you want no fluff or faff. Also I have to mention this http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
- nluken 4y ago
  ChatGPT also doesn't really understand the recipes it's giving you, so I don't know if I would trust it to make something tasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT8KoWpqUgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT8KoWpqUgg
- alach11 4y ago
  ChatGPT is the last thing I would use for recipe help (0). Instead I'd go with a reliable source like SeriousEats, NYTimes, or as you suggested, Cooking for Engineers. (0) - https://i.redd.it/8xvhkhxc495a1.png https://i.redd.it/8xvhkhxc495a1.png
  - dicethrowaway1 4y ago
    That's awfully specific, I'm guessing it was preprompted.
  - voytec 4y ago
    Now that's highly caloric!
cosinetau 4y ago
Beans do not belong in chili. They are probably writing so much in hopes you do not notice.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  So true. And they left out the macaroni!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  An alternative opinion with a logical underpinning: 1) Chili is a dish most closely associated with the southwestern United States. 2) Among the most important cultivars of that region, dating back thousands of years, are: peppers, maize, squash, beans. This combination provides a complete mix of nutrients for a healthy diet. 3) Therefore, adding all those ingredients to chili in some form or other is entirely justifiable, as well as being historically accurate. Meat, on the other hand, is entirely optional.
  - cosinetau 4y ago
    Can you help me corroborate your theory of historically accurate chili? I can not find any document supporting your "thousands of years" claim. It not hard to believe that native people dumped some of the earth's best vegetables into a pot and let them steep, but, I can not find _any_ support for your claim. I genuinely hope you enjoy your historically-accurate, bean-laden chili, but now I am suspicious; I know that LLMs can not really enjoy the richness in any chili.
    - VLM 4y ago
      This is the problem in a nutshell, do you define a "good recipe" as one that is historically accurate, that tastes good, or that follows various belief systems like not culturally appropriating or only culturally appropriating when you do a good job of it? Meanwhile the ad sales platform is going to define a "good recipe" as one that results in high click thru on ads they have contracts for. And add a side dish of the people doing the rating of how good the page is, specifically have zero skill in the field and are going to have intense normie middle of the road bias because on average they don't know anything. If you magically crowdsourced the averaged opinion of average folks about the General Theory of Relativity in 1900, would that result be useful and have beaten Einstein before he wrote it in 1915? The AI people think so; especially the ones who's paychecks depend on it; personally I have my doubts.
somecompanyguy 4y ago
the lore that know-nothings told themselves about seo. the think seo is about content, its about users. they screwed this pooch up over a decade ago and it noticeably changed the content of the internet for the worse, much like what people are now consciously thinking about chatgpt. its shocking that we finally have enough people to notice this but it wont be enough.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Google wills it so. Why? IDK, ask them. Probably yet another case of something net-harmful making them more money. Luckily it's also one of the only cases where a microformat is actually nigh-universally used. Outside a few sites where the "fluff" isn't fluff and is actually good content itself (e.g. Serious Eats) I just throw the URL into Paprika 3 (no affiliation, and there are tons of other programs and probably some browser plugins to do the same thing) and let it strip it down to the ingredients and instructions by reading the microformat markup. Works flawlessly nearly every time. [EDIT] Credit where it's due, I'm also pretty sure the microformat is only popular because of Google. I think they downrank sites in recipe searches if Google can't "see" the recipe, using the microformat. They may be both the cause of, and solution to, the problem.
- Justin_K 4y ago
  Trying to mentally parse these long winded recipes = takes longer to read = "greater engagement". These crappy recipes are all about seo and add placement as you'll notice these recipes are loaded with Google ads. So it is a self fulfilling prophecy that the pages where users spend more time and see more ads are ranked highest.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    I suspect theres also a halo effect. Like how select cuts of beef slow roasted with veggies and served on a bed of glazed hand cut potatoes. Is more appealing to a potential cook than cut beef in a slow cooker with some wedges.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    I’ve completely given up on web recipes, and only use YouTube ones now. Most of the good recipes have a comment that has a condensed version of ingredients and instructions.
- jxdxbx 4y ago
  Yes. I think Google deserves a ton of credit for microformats, and you can just use a browser extension like Repibox that shows you only the recipe when you go to a recipe site. I think the reason Google wanted microformats is for Google Assistant recipe answers.
chiffre01 4y ago
The Internet Archive has hundreds of free to read cookbooks full of recipes with minimal or no additional story.
ravenstine 4y ago
Nearly everything online today is long-winded. Hell, most media is long-winded. You can't just know what happened, where, and why; you've got to read a creative-writing thesis to "put you in the shoes" of the subject du jour. You can't simply watch a lecture; you need fancy graphics and fast cuts with memes woven in. Want a compelling story? You better watch all 6 seasons, including the remaining 4 without the original writers, and be prepared to be disappointed. How about learning to fix your car? In that case, be prepared for 3 minutes worth of info in 20 minutes of some schmo complaining about why Hyundais suck while he constantly jiggles the camera and gloats about much more clever he is than other mechanics. News, blogs, recipes, shows, instructional videos... all pretty much blow chunks. Any time I simply want straight forward information it becomes a matter of frequent fast-forwarding and combining of info from disparate sources when it shouldn't be necessary. Get. To. The. Point.
- kirkules 4y ago
  It's easy to think all of the things you wanted to say were important, so you leave them in. But often they weren't so important to your eventual audience.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Honestly I think this is part of the reason why Twitter was so successful for so long. The rest of the internet has become so padded for length (even streaming TV content -- how many shows have you watched where you thought "this would be better as a movie"?) one platform that demands you focus on being short, punchy, and getting straight to the point would obviously ascend.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    And instead people make tweetchains a dozen long, making Twitter the worst of all worlds. It got better when they raised the cap from 140, but it's still too low to saying anything of substance or nuance.
    - Pxtl 4y ago
newobj 4y ago
Get the Paprika 3 app, it’s amazing. You can put in a irl and it scrapes the ingredients and directions and stores them locally.
akiselev 4y ago
Google measures the amount of time you spend on a webpage before you go back to the search page (if you dont open in a new tab) and it’s used as an important ranking signal. That’s pretty much it. All the long winded recipe bullshit just keeps you on the page longer before you realize the recipe is crap.
bottlepalm 4y ago
Long form content’s days are numbered with AI on the horizon. Th primary reason being generating long form has become so cheap with AI that it has essentially rendered it worthless.
- julienchastang 4y ago
  Speaking of AI, I think the image at the top of the blog post was generated by AI, maybe Stable Diffusion. I wonder what the prompt was.
- VLM 4y ago
  The problem will not be that the value of content will drop to zero, but that the value of asking someone else to ask ChatGPT for me and then wrap it in ads for me to view is very low compared to the inevitable result of I'll just ask ChatGPT or similar directly. Its the LMFGTFY or whatever the acronym for "let me google that for you" brought to ChatGPT topics. If, for example, as already seems to be the case, the news becomes nothing more than someone else generated algorithmic fluff mixed with censored propaganda that somehow ends up with lower trust metrics than actual email spam, why do I need someone to make that for me, just ask for my own copy. The future will not be CNN trying to lie to you and sell you stuff, it'll be the AI directly lying to you and trying to sell you stuff, CNN will no longer be a provider of value. Or MSNBC or Fox or BBC or your choice of propaganda outlet. The other side problem is if you want culinary excellence today you'll eventually find guidance to buy "modernist cuisine at home" or similar technical cookbooks or maybe some old Alton Brown TV show memes, but search engines are required by corporate to have total randos provide opinions about page quality and needs met that are going to be uneducated and thus generic/bland and are designed to select inoffensive bland middle of the road content, not excellent recipes. What appeals to children more, an animated skinner box / loot box paradise designed to attract their attention and lure them in, or a calculus textbook? If corporate goal is to maximize the former you'll get more of the former, but what if the latter is the only way to learn calculus? Well, you aint going to learn calculus, thats for sure. How AI / ChatGPT will avoid bland normie ignorance is an excellent question. How to provide bland middle of the road answers to bland middle of the road questions is essentially a solved problem; how to cook the best hamburger possible cannot be handled by that subculture where groupthink conforming to average blandness is the primary criteria enforced.
strig 4y ago
This chrome extension is helpful, shows the recipe automatically in a modal: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  I just tried it and it works well. Thanks for suggestion
- fancy_pantser 4y ago
  Thank you for mentioning my extension! I created it after a comment here on HN spurred me into action, finally fed up with long-winded recipe blogs.
christopherslee 4y ago
I'm sure there's some SEO component, but I'm surprised no one mentioned ads. More real estate for you to scroll through for display ads?
- vharuck 4y ago
  Point #3 from TFA mentions longer pages giving more space for ads. I agree, though. It's why I try going to websites run by people who make their money elsewhere. Like Food Network.
- pellucidar 4y ago
  Out of sight, out of mind, but they were mentioned a few times.
gaberunsalot 4y ago
Try the Fresco app.
photochemsyn 4y ago
There should be a standardized json format for recipies. Main keys for individual dishes could be 'ingredients', 'preparation', 'cooking', 'serving'.
- tflinton 4y ago
  There is, schema.org has a Recipe type that most recipe blogs will publish the recipe as a json object in script tags.
878654Tom 4y ago
Wouldn't this be the case of clean recipe websites just being rated lower as their content seeks like duplication while these long-winded websites have a lot of original content even though that original content is not what you are searching for. Like, a clean website about how to reverse sear a steak has maybe like 5 sentences and other clean websites write it the same for 90% (how many ways can you explain it?) but a website full of fluff has 200 sentences that are more original making the content look unique while they still describe how to reverse sear a steak.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Recipes on the internet are the worst mess, thousands of recipes for yellow cake that differ in ingredients and quantities for no discernable reason, someone's recipe for spanish rice made with taco bell sauce packets, macaroni and cheese with more mayonnaise then macaroni and cheese combined, and now the bloggers where you have to read through six pages of how the author used to make the recipe with their departed grandmother before getting to anything of substance. Instead I bought a used 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook from a used book store, beats Google every time.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking
  - jakebasile 4y ago
    I bought a copy of this for $20 recently. It has not failed me yet.
  - bregma 4y ago
    That one hasn't been the same since newer editions took out the illustrated how-to-skin-a-squirrel entry.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      First catch your tiger.
      - h2odragon 4y ago
        substituting ingredients in recipes is a thing, but you can only stretch so far. how many recipes for tiger are there, anyway? i can't really see it working in place of squirrel except maybe in sausage and Squirrel Surprise
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  The problem with old cookbooks is that ingredients and tastes change dramatically over the years. Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork. Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity. Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.
HlessClaudesman 4y ago
My longwinded crap filteiring heuristic: If an article hasn't gotten to the point by paragraph 3, I'm out.
- ptsneves 4y ago
  Great heuristic! Will try it out. I basically gave up on searching for recipes on google. I found that supermarket or store-websites often get down to the point and without ridiculously special ingredients for something as simple as a soup. I once looked for a beetroot soup recipe and was dumbfounded by the crazy spices and preparations required for something so simple. I always found that I never had the ingredients so I went ahead and tried to come up with the recipe myself. It makes me wonder how much actual knowledge is now buried or hard to find in the age of the internet. The irony of it all.
Aaronstotle 4y ago
One of my favorite uses of Chat GPT is asking it for recipes because it doesn't add a narrative
- alach11 4y ago
  The problem is ChatGPT recipes are (frequently) bad or (unlikely but possibly) dangerous. Maybe this will change as the service improves? For now though you'd be much better off using a low-fluff reliable source like SeriousEats or NYTimes.
dfxm12 4y ago
FWIW, a lot of top selling cookbooks are like this as well. Maybe there's not a blurb like this before every recipe, but I don't think I've got a cookbook that doesn't have at least some memoir or essay between sections and/or a few personal stories attached to recipes throughout.
- tayo42 4y ago
  It's not much of an issue though it's so quick and effortless to scan a page. And I like the background info in the cookbooks I have.
jihadjihad 4y ago
I saw it mentioned here on HN by the author themselves, and after using it for a few weeks it's been a game changer. If you're tired of reading a person's life story in a recipe, give Umami a shot. It's free, too. https://www.umami.recipes/ https://www.umami.recipes/
extr0pian 4y ago
Personally, I find the vast majority of recipe websites absolutely terrible. It seems others have shared small and minimalist recipe websites, but the one that I use and haven't seen shared yet is https://plain.recipes https://plain.recipes.
bmelton 4y ago
The conventional wisdom for SEO is that "good content" ranges between 2,000-4,000 words. Most recipes are but a fraction of that, so the rest is filler to meet the aforementioned SEO wisdom. I'm not sure whether Google actually does or doesn't reward content fitting with that arbitrary range, or why it might, but all the SEO Youtubers are saying it does, so all the people cargo culting SEO wisdom are doing it, so it doesn't really matter. More practically, the longer a piece of content appears to be, the more opportunities to stuff ads into it without appearing like a cash grab. Google does definitely reward users for including micro-slash-schema based content though, so the recipes themselves are likely included on the page in a parsable json+ld format, which is great for ingestion by apps like Paprika (which many others have mentioned.) The good news is that there are rumors that Google is moving away from whatever content-based system they may or may not have been using before, and towards a "helpfulness" system for ranking pages -- basically, how directly did this article address the search question that took you to it as the answer. This should prefer direct, concise answers (e.g., "2+2 = 4" vs "2+2 starts with the history of numbers, which are of course ciphered numeral systems originating with the Egyptians") Time will tell how accurately that can be measured, or what wild gamesmanship will occur as the result of it.
pjkundert 4y ago
We will soon have LLMs that: - aren’t infected by “Woke” theology (ie. accurately reflects the source material, not someone’s belief-based constraints) - prioritizes the sources that most succinctly explain the desired topic - And, sounds least like something generated by an LLM!
rogerbinns 4y ago
Plain recipes have no copyright protection[1]. The other surrounding text does have copyright protection, so any recipe publisher needs to have additional text and to be able to detect if someone else has copied it. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
- SamBam 4y ago
  This is the answer that is always trotted out, but it's unclear whether there is any truth to it being the reason bloggers actually add the stories. Heck, if that were the reason they wouldn't need three pages of content they could have a single paragraph, it would come to the same thing. It never made any sense to me that recipe bloggers would need to resort to putting pages upon pages of detailed life history in every single post, just on the off chance that someone is going to steal their meatloaf recipe and re-post it on another blog. I was glad the OP article didn't mention that theory. I actually really believe that reason #1 in the article was the origin -- people actually liked reading the stories. When recipe blogs were new, and there were fewer of them, it was common to actually check back on the blogs and see if they had posted new content. I used to follow a number of recipe blogs, including Orangette, which I really liked, and would both read her stories and try her recipes. She (like similar bloggers) developed enough of a following that she was then hired by the Times to write similar recipes and stories. Heck, speaking of the Times, or other newspapers, they almost always intro a recipe with a story of some kind. This is not just for copyright reasons, but because people actually read them. (e.g. [1]) This audience is different from the one who just googles "Meatloaf recipe" and clicks on the one with the most stars. When you do that, then no, you generally don't want to hear the "life story." But maybe some readers do read it, it connects with them, and then they actually go back to that same site again. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/dining/citrus-salad-almond-cake-rice-casserole-recipes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/dining/citrus-salad-almon...
- jxdxbx 4y ago
  Recipes as in the steps to cook something, the algorithm, the steps and amounts and ingredients are not copyrightable. The TEXT of a recipe is, at least to the extent it is minimally creative.
erybodyknows 4y ago
A misalignment of incentives. Recipe sites want you to stay on the site for as long as possible, to serve you as many ads as possible, as this increases their income. Providing you with a clear recipe is not their primary goal.
H1Supreme 4y ago
For folks who often find themselves searching the web for recipes, I'd recommend picking up a cookbook or two. My girlfriend has a stack of them she's inherited from family members over the years. We like to casually leaf through them to look for ideas. I've come to prefer this method because it's effectively the opposite of searching for recipes. Here's a curated list of meals you can make, pick one. I'd recommend a used book store, if possible. You'll probably get some random Grandma notes in the margins for substitutions / modifications.
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  Cookbooks still have the same issue as an online recipe. Namely, you won’t know how good the recipe is until after you make it.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    That's just the way cooking food works, regardless of the recipe source.
    - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
      Which makes the value proposition of cookbooks dubious!
      - Arrath 4y ago
        I have to heartily disagree. Besides, you're more than welcome to make changes to any given recipe (and even notate those changes in the book!)
        Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        I love online recipes. I can see what other people said about the recipe, and it’s more likely to be something contemporary. Many of the recipes in cookbooks “age out” as that style of cuisine goes out of style. See: 1950s recipes with jello.
weedking 4y ago
NYT recipes are a nice refuge from this sort of thing. Easy to get around the paywall with browser add-ons as well.
killtheweb 4y ago
[dead]
dinkleberg 4y ago
SEO may be the reason for many of the bigger blogs, but I think we shouldn't default to cynicism here. People who are passionate about a given topic often love to ramble on about it. And if you aren't very passionate about food, you aren't likely to start a food blog. And most people don't start blogging as a purely educational activity, but rather as a way of expressing themselves. As a result, they aren't necessarily thinking about optimal user experience like a software business would. I had a coworker who had a food blog and she would fill each post with ramblings like all the rest do, but it is because she wanted to tell her story of why that particular meal was important to her. And if you were to ask her in person about a meal or what she likes to cook, she would talk in as much detail since that was her passion. The default of assuming everyone is a bad actor is growing rather tiresome. Not to mention, these people didn't need to share their recipes at all. And we aren't compensating them for their work. We just complain.
- schnable 4y ago
  Agreed, but in this case the outside incentives align with the passion, thus making this style proliferate.
byronic 4y ago
I got so mad about this exact behavior that I started an (occasionally-updated) git repository with no-cruft recipes. https://github.com/byronic/recipes https://github.com/byronic/recipes
sharx 4y ago
these days there is almost always a "jump to recipe" button at the top in my experience
- sct202 4y ago
  The buttons kind of blend in sometimes since they're next to the social media buttons. It's pretty wild that like the vast majority of sibling comments are about apps and scrapers, when there are already on-page solutions.
iambateman 4y ago
I had the same question, so I made https://SimplifyRecipe.com https://SimplifyRecipe.com a few weeks ago! There’s an iOS shortcut and chrome extension to reliably get rid of the life story. Hope it’s useful. :)
yafbum 4y ago
Because the people publishing them love to pack them with ads, and long-windedness causes more ad impressions.
readingnews 4y ago
I think you mean "why is everything online so long-winded". Geez, look up any video on nearly anything simple, they all follow the same format: * 10 mins of nonsense and irrelevant background into how great you are * 10 mins of setup * 10 mins of drama build-up * 1 min of the actual event * 10 mins of closing comments Oh, wait, I forgot, it is not about the content, it is all about how long I can get you to watch so I get more nickels. Dang, now I made myself sad...
- Chirael 4y ago
  Don’t forget to like and subscribe
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  Also applies to self help books. There's 10 pages of content, but people won't pay $40 for 10 pages so you gotta fill it with 190 pages of nonsense and spread the content around to the point of making it useless.
  - passwordoops 4y ago
    Something something storytelling
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Interestingly they provide 180 pages of filler to give a 10 page summary of Buddhism which is itself captured in 57 dense volumes of content. That level of compression gives you an indication of how valuable a self help book will be. https://archive.org/details/dhatukatha-pts/182706089-Udana-and-Itivuttaka-tr-Ireland-pdf/page/183/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/dhatukatha-pts/182706089-Udana-a...
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      You could argue that a ten-page "summary" of Buddhism is long-winded, and that if you can't convey the essence with a glance, then you're finger-painting.
Eleison23 4y ago
[dead]
martin_a 4y ago
SEO. That's it. Done. No need to read another article about it.
delecti 4y ago
Most recipe pages also include links directly to the recipe right at the top. The blog portion is annoying, and also leads to some funny memes, but it's easy to bypass.
kraussvonespy 4y ago
Opposite opinion here: Internet recipes are generally terrible. It's almost impossible to make any determination as to whether recipes have ever been tested or optimized or anything, and I just don't trust them. But if I go to seriouseats.com (for example) and they show me all of the work they went through to get to the recipe, I trust them. I'd say that well over half of the random Internet recipes I try aren't very good, have been developed with bad techniques, use the wrong flavors, try to fix flavor issues by adding more flavors and so on. Using a vetted site (the America's Test Kitchen recipes are also quite good) gets me ~98% success. I'd rather take the extra 5 minutes of time to look through how the recipe was created and tested to make sure it's a good recipe than spend a couple of hours making an unknown recipe with a 50/50 shot to not be terrible. YMMV.
- ben7799 4y ago
  ATK does some amazing stuff. Their gluten free baking concepts in their cookbook are like a decade ahead of most of the gluten free products you can buy at the store. Crazy stuff.
  - kraussvonespy 4y ago
    That's a great tip! I'm getting more dinner guests with gluten issues and would like to get better at that side of cooking. Is there a good place (cookbook) to start with?
- jerf 4y ago
  I just use internet recipes for ideas more than anything else. Yesterday the wife's dinner instructions were "we have chicken and sweet potatoes", and I didn't feel like just cooking them directly. So I googled around a bit and came up with https://www.self.com/gallery/non-boring-ways-to-eat-chicken-and-sweet-potatoes https://www.self.com/gallery/non-boring-ways-to-eat-chicken-... , no particular recommendation here, just posting that to show that I ultimately saw the picture for the "buffalo chicken sweet potatos" and made something based on that idea. I didn't even look at the recipe. In fact, I only just now noticed that the picture went with #4 and not #3. (Looking at the recipe now, I didn't even guess the ingredients from the picture correctly.) And what was nice isn't that I made something amazing, it's more that I made something that was good, and wasn't our usual fare. It's not something I would normally have done. The internet is pretty decent at that. If you've been cooking long enough to read a recipe and just take a few ideas here and there, I find it very helpful. But it's been a long time since I pulled a recipe from the internet and carefully made it exactly as described. There's a lot of people with tastes quite different than mine, and somewhat more judgmentally, there's a lot of people out there with no taste posting their recipes. On the Internet, nobody knows you have the culinary tastes of a dog.
kemiller2002 4y ago
It's because recipes aren't copy writable. Stories are. If you include the story then it's much harder to scrape the recipe.
indymike 4y ago
SEO. Recipes are a great place to learn how bad SEO makes content for people.
nottorp 4y ago
Without reading the article, it's because I have yet to see a recipe that's not on a blogspam site.
AlbertCory 4y ago
My new go-to is not to search DDG or Google at all. Just go to seriouseats.com and search there. America's Test Kitchen is a good second choice. There IS a lot of text, but it's mostly explaining how they tested and derived this recipe, and what the alternatives are. You can always skip to the end.
sshadow 4y ago
This reads like the pages they're talking about.
- 4monthsaway 4y ago
  Read it until the end
tuckerpo 4y ago
Luke Smith, the FOSS + minimalism evangelist has a platform to solve this: https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ Shortform, straight to the point recipes. Just ingredients and steps. No ads. No life stories.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Nice lightweight site, but I don't tend to trust recipes that don't have any feedback from people who've attempted it. Which, of course, leads to the review-spam problem.
baud147258 4y ago
I'm finding weird that it's not the case for recipes in French... Like the first result for 'soupe à l'oignon' on google is this one: https://www.marmiton.org/recettes/recette_soupe-a-l-oignon_10891.aspx https://www.marmiton.org/recettes/recette_soupe-a-l-oignon_1... and it's similar for all the recipes I search for online (in French). It's full of ads and sponsored content, but the recipe is ingredient list and instructions. Maybe it's because all the recipes seem to be concentrated on a handful of big websites with thousands of recipes, which fits with part '#3. It’s a business' of the article.
Planktonne 4y ago
It's been a very long time since I've visited a recipe site that didn't have a prominent 'jump to recipe' button. Recipes have stories because some people value them, and they have a button for those who don't. This is a tired, old complaint made by people who don't actually ever cook or read recipes, they just want to shop AI solutions / flog their 'innovative' start-up / write about a different topic entirely but draw readers in initially with a 'kids these days' tone.
- daveguy 4y ago
  Sites have stories because recipes cannot be copyrighted, but stories can.
  - Planktonne 4y ago
    That is one of the reasons for some of those stories, sure. However, the specifics of reasons have basically nothing to do with the trend of tech evangelists making the same tedious and inaccurate arguments again and again. In this article, the blogger decrying the practice links to a recipe blogger who's already covered the same ground more efficiently; this isn't even hot air. 'Why do tech bloggers always use this outdated example to pad things' is a better and far more original question.
dawnerd 4y ago
Oh hey, something I have first hand experience with working with fairly large food / recipe focused sites. It's primarily driven by ads. I know, huge shock there. A lot of people might assume it's purely an SEO play and while that's true to an extent, it's mostly for the ads.
- radley 4y ago
  Yeah, I figured ad space plus engagement stats. By placing the recipe at the bottom of a long page, they can show multiple ads. Viewers will have to engage longer, demonstrating greater relevancy and interest by scrolling to the end of the page.
gr4yb34rd 4y ago
i really do not like being the guy that goes "but chatgpt" in threads about other topics, but i have found it to be pretty good at generating simplified recipes.
mkl95 4y ago
Some guy at Google decided it was the way to go almost 20 years ago, and it was cargoculted into oblivion
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
ad placement /thread
daniel-s 4y ago
https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ The best recipe website on the internet. Is the best and doesn't rank on Google specifically because it doesn't do what this article talks about.
- jefftk 4y ago
  It's a nice site, but I think the main reason it's not popular is that it doesn't have pictures. People like to see pictures before cooking.
graeme 4y ago
I am amazed the article and the comments do not mention copyright. 1. You can’t copyright a recipe 2. You can copyright the text of a long winded story which contains a recipe Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...
- TehShrike 4y ago
  I've heard this explanation before but it sounds like one of those "it sounds plausible, so people will keep repeating it" explanations. I suspect the real reason is what the author of the post claims – Google sends more readers to articles with lots of fluff. > This food blogger wrote about an experiment she conducted. She listened to some of her readers and actually tried just putting the recipe up top before everything else. All of the articles in her experiment went lower in the rankings.
  - graeme 4y ago
    Oh, to be clear: I agree! Google also rewards the fluff, you can show more ads, etc But the copyright is part of the equation and it deserves a mention. Also, part of google rankings is manual quality review, familiarity, etc. if a recipe site strongly diverges from the normal form it can confuse readers or quality rankers. The lack of copyright to a degree has influenced the form that is now industry standard.
- noworld 4y ago
  Weird thought - you can't copyright a recipe, but could you patent one?
  - nkurz 4y ago
    Generally no. It's technically possible, but very few recipes would qualify for patent protection. Here's a decent summary article: Can I patent a recipe? The simple answer is no. While it is technically possible to obtain a patent on certain recipes, the likelihood and rate of patents being granted for recipes is so low that it is almost pointless to try and obtain one unless you own a chain of restaurants or are looking to franchise your business. The effort required to protect intellectual property, such as a secret recipe or cooking process, is so great, and there are so many hurdles one must clear, that the ends hardly justify the means. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-recipes-trade-secrets-and-patents.html https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-...
deleted 4y ago
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hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Saw a tweet recently where someone took a long-winded recipe from a website, posted it to ChatGPT and asked ChatGPT to play it back, taking out all the fluff and making it succinct. Result was perfect, just an ingredients list and simple instructions, no mistakes.
meowzero 4y ago
Everything is long winded these days: books, recipes, podcasts, videos, blogs, etc. Even with tiktoks, they try to use the maximum amount of time for their content.
rreichel03 4y ago
I found that this was particularly notable while browsing on my phone so I built an iOS app extension [1] a year ago that attempts to fix this! Its not perfect and always a WIP, but its made my friends and family's lives a lot easier. [1]. https://recipereader.reichel.dev https://recipereader.reichel.dev
Reason077 4y ago
This is why I love www.bbcgoodfood.com. Good quality recipes. Short and too the point, usually just 1-2 pages. No ads or silly long winded stories. Long live public service media!
Tams80 4y ago
Eh? I just stick to a few sites that have more recipes than I could likely ever cook, and despite being adventurous, I won't ever cook all of them. BBC Food BBC Good Food Cookpad The odd The Guardian recipe (which are full of fluff) I'm sure others can point you to other sites that just have recipes.
jefftk 4y ago
Very impressive that this post itself is a 1000-word introduction to a chili recipe.
rapsacnz 4y ago
I generally try to find Jamie Oliver versions of recipes - they are short, tested and they taste good.
numeromancer 4y ago
You might like this: https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
Trowter 4y ago
People on this forum will not like this opinion but I think TikTok is the superior recipe platform. If you already know the basics on how to cook it's great. Quick fire ingredients and methods with visuals to back it up, I can absorb an entire recipe in less than 30 seconds. I have an account dedicated to recipes and they algorithm is pretty good and will pretty much only ever show me recipes or similar nutrition based stuff.
- valarauko 4y ago
  I think TikTok wouldn't work for most people for recipes. Short format aside, it's a great visual aid for sure, but I personally find the utility limited. It's alright for limited ingredients & steps with forgiving proportions, but I think it breaks down beyond that. I suppose it helps to temper expectations, though. Cacio e pepe? Sure. Baking recipe with multiple unforgiving precise measurements and temperatures? Not so much - for most people.
srcreigh 4y ago
Even the worst recipe sites often have a "Jump to recipe" button to skip past the story and ads. pihole works decently well to stop ads from loading on mobile, speeding up the site and avoiding janky movement of the copy as ads load in.
yibg 4y ago
Interestingly I noticed this a while ago and in talking to some friends it seems this is less of a problem in some other languages. For example Chinese recipes and Thai receipes (in Chinese and Thai) seem to get straight to the point. Where as most English recipes I find on google takes page 3 to get to the meat of it.
harrywynn 4y ago
I spent a few hours this past weekend putting my own recipes up for exactly this reason. Just give me the info. https://gluten-free.recipes https://gluten-free.recipes
kazinator 4y ago
To keep your eyes on the page longer so you are exposed to ads more.
jedberg 4y ago
The irony of a long blog post about this is not lost on me. The answer is simple: "SEO. Google favors longer pages with unique content. If you just put the recipe it would look just like every other recipe on every other page".
withinrafael 4y ago
A simple set of directions is uncopyrightable. (https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf) Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by "substantial literary expression." (https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html)
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  The whole of the article may be copyrightable, but the actual recipe and ingredients remains uncopyrightable. From you first link: > However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself.
jollyllama 4y ago
I figured it was to incentivize you to buy a cookbook or recipe catalogue without the ranting.
resuresu 4y ago
based.cooking
WorldMaker 4y ago
Bullet point #1 here doesn't get enough credit either in this article or generally here on HN comments, but is a major factor. A lot of the recipe blogs that originated this form of long-winded stories leading into the eventual recipe have regular readers. Many of those readers aren't looking for specific recipes at any given time they are looking for the stories first. Those stories are the real content to those regular readers. (And regular readers with their recurring ad revenue/demographics are the ones that pay the bills, ultimately, not "went searching for a specific recipe" utilitarian users.) This isn't even a new phenomenon in recipes pop culture, because food TV shows learned this decades ago. Most cooking shows break down into two categories: competitions (which mostly never even give recipes) and "lifestyle" shows that may include recipes but just as much include the "celebrity chefs" chatting as much about who they are and what is going on in their lives and storytelling why the recipes in question were of interest in that moment as much as the details of the recipes themselves. This isn't even an isolated phenomenon to recipes. It is common, modern parasocial behavior. You could look at something like Twitch as a utilitarian resource to see gameplay or learn tips/tricks, but obviously nearly every stream is full of streamers chatting about their day while they wait for game lobbies or in between other parts of gameplay and whatever tips/tricks they may have to impart. It's the parasocial "human interest" that builds the biggest and most reliable parts of their audiences (and in turn most of their revenue). There are a lot of reasons people complain about it a lot more with recipe bloggers than Twitch streamers.
- hector_vasquez 4y ago
  The true outrage isn't that the 0.01% of recipe seekers who like to read a story and get served 77 ads as they scroll through and laugh/cry before the recipe get these recipes high in Google's search results. It's that the rest of us who HATE ALL THAT also get these abhorrent search results.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    If 100% of regular blog readers want that story and that makes up 98% of your ad revenue, it doesn't matter what percentage of outside ad hoc search engine traffic don't want that story. You aren't wrong to feel "outrage" as that external random visitor with no interest in the blog except for one single random recipe, but you aren't the target audience, sorry.
zerocrates 4y ago
I've never quite understood why people hate this trend so much. The fluff is often overdone, agreed, but when you don't want that stuff, just scroll down until you hit ingredients and you're good to go.
ano-ther 4y ago
If Google rewards the fluff, couldn’t the authors put it after the actual recipe? I.e., tldr; first and then the backstory?
fleddr 4y ago
So let us imagine an ideal situation from a recipe consumer point of view. You go to Google, type "best chili recipe", and Google would immediately show the best recipe directly into its UI, based on all the data is has on you and some sophisticated recommendation algorithm. Further, you have a set of standardized actions like "print", "send to iPad", "favorite", etc. You no longer have to read the author's diary entry and this entire hyper-optimized workflow doesn't cost you a cent. Perfect, right? Well, I suppose that in these AI times ultimately the effort of even asking the question would be redundant, obviously Google knows Wednesday is your chili day, and your fridge had already ordered the ingredient. There's just one problem: what about the recipe writers? What about artists? What about anybody ever producing any content of monetizable value? What incentive is there to produce content when users never pay directly and middlemen aggregate it, removing you from the equation? You, the person that created the bloody thing. It's like you don't even exist. This isn't just big tech, we have an active role in this. When users do not have to pay, they generally won't. Digital content has no value yet we obviously have the natural born right to consume it anyway.
- shrx 4y ago
  Why do you feel everything needs to be monetized? You don't need to be compensated for sharing a recipe online, you can upload it just because you like the outcome so much that you want others to try it too.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    "Why do you feel everything needs to be monetized?" You should ask Google that. Because they're the one actually monetizing. It's like a money printer with everybody's content as free fuel. I didn't say everything needs to be monetized. I'm saying that there's content that requires to be monetized (otherwise the content will simply not be produced) and content where the producer will attempt to monetize it because they believe it has monetary value. Surely it's up to the content producer to decide on monetization and not you. If you believe a recipe is worthless and not worthy of payment, yet then still continue to consume it regardless by bypassing any attempt at monetization, you're a hypocrite. Either it is worthless or it isn't. You can't have it both ways. Or well, on the internet you can, and that is exactly the problem. Don't take it as a personal attack. Our internet culture is hypocritical. It's a WE thing and I include myself in it. The internet we have is of our own making and our own behavior.
danielvaughn 4y ago
Online recipes were the catalyst for me switching from Chrome to Brave. It doesn't remove the filler copy, but at least there's not an ad every 2 sentences.
kgc 4y ago
More ad targeting possibilities.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RedditKon 4y ago
SEO - Google ranks those pages higher.
de_nied 4y ago
> I think the only potential fix to something like this is one of the hardest to overcome—brand name. If you’re searching for Gordan Ramsay’s Jammed Turkey or Rachael Ray’s Glimmering Sunflower Seeds, they can probably get away with 0% fluff content. The rest of us humble content creators probably cannot (until we’re dining with the stars, that is.) [query site:.edu] gives me the base of any recipe I need, mostly without the fluff.
mattpallissard 4y ago
Scrapes the site for just the steps. Works pretty well too. https://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/

163 points by 4monthsaway 4y ago

The real reason is because recipes consisting of just the list of ingredients can't be copyrighted, but the articles and all the other stuff are copyrightable.

nsxwolf 4y ago
A couple paragraphs ought to be enough to make it copyrightable.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Ingredients lists and basic instructions ("place potatoes in boiling water") are not copyrightable. Only the additional text is copyrightable. This has long been a 'problem' for cookbook writers and chefs. Unlike cookbooks, blogs have no particular constraints on how much text they can add, and as pointed out here, perverse incentives to add lots of extraneous material.
brians 4y ago
I don’t see this. If somebody’s scraped just the recipes from all these long winded sites, I’d be thrilled! Adding the extra nonsense and narrative doesn’t prevent that. The reason is SEO; this is Google’s fault.
- tomstockmail 4y ago
  There's https://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/ (I am not affiliated with it)

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

SEO.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
k2enemy 4y ago
I also wonder how much of it is a perception among the blog authors that they have to make their recipes long winded for SEO reasons. They see everyone else doing it, there's an information cascade, and they believe (perhaps incorrectly) that they also must do it.
- VLM 4y ago
  There's a link to a PDF here from google itself. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en I suppose you could have a "conspiracy theory" level argument that Google publishes what it claims it will do only to turn around and do the opposite, but that seems unlikely. Unfortunately if you publish guidelines that you'll promote pages that are not auto-generated DB dumps, and prefer pages that promote the idea the author put in a lot of effort and is highly authoritative and E-E-A-T and all that you can read in the guidelines, you're going to get generic recipes wrapped in a VERY thick blanket of fake filler, good enough to fool the average reader (whom doesn't read very well) but ridiculously inadequate compared to where the pros and semi-pros operate.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

Speaking as someone who likes to cook, and hates wading through pages of SEO bait to find the actual recipe, it seems like in principle it wouldn't be too hard to write a search engine specialized for recipes that heavily penalizes longwindedness.

worldofmatthew 4y ago
https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ ?
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  bookmarked, thanks
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  Made the cod chowder last night. Came out great, but there's one thing I noticed: the recipe didn't specify how much water or salt to use. I eyeballed it and it came out fine, but that probably wouldn't work for something touchier like baked goods.
  - worldofmatthew 4y ago
    Maybe look at adding a merge request on github?

epr 4y ago

4. Copyright protection does not apply to recipes themselves, but does apply to the fluff. IANAL

barrkel 4y ago

Sometimes they could still do with more detail, especially when using imprecise imperial measurements. The one that I find most irritating is using volume measurements for non-liquids, e.g. cup of flour (sifted or not?), or ratios, where it's not specified if it's a weight:weight or volume:volume ratio.

kspacewalk2 4y ago

You can try plainoldrecipe.com[0] for de-cluttering recipes. It doesn't work for a lot of the bloggy recipe sites, but when it does[1], it's great. And it works for all the popular sites like AllRecipes. [0] https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ [1] https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spendwithpennies.com%2Feasy-quiche-recipe%2F https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spen...

gaudat 4y ago
Also see this crowdsourced alternative. If there are cooks on HN you can send a pull request to add your receipe. https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
- seanw444 4y ago
  Was going to comment this, but figured someone had to have already.
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    Was going to ask someone to post it because I couldn't find the link anymore!
twh270 4y ago
There's also the app CopyMeThat, which will capture recipes from darn near anything, let you tag and otherwise organize them, let you make a mealplan, and more. We have 3000+ recipes in it now (of which we've made probably a couple hundred lol).

macinjosh 4y ago

1. People like to talk/write/blab 2. Keywords and content for SEO 3. Some bloggers plan on compiling their posts into a cookbook

WilTimSon 4y ago
Now I can screenshot this and make a post "Why Are Answers That Aren't On HN So Long-Winded?", because you recapped the whole thing in 3 sentences.

gnarbarian 4y ago

I would love to see a crowdsourced cookbook with user submitted variations on recipes and vote ranking and comments. search by ingredients, dish, macros, calories. create meal plans, meal prep, shopping lists. then you can integrate with grocery store apis to pick up your shopping list or have it delivered with Instacart. there are lots of avenues for monetization but it's a crowded space and hard to build all these features in and gain momentum.

abhijeetpbodas 4y ago
https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
- killtheweb 4y ago
  [dead]
- gnarbarian 4y ago
  I love this and I will use it but it's missing the key features I described around meal plans with nutrient targets and shopping lists.
tayo42 4y ago
My little dream project is to build a yelp for recipes. Books, internet or custom from users. I don't like Google results and also don't think search engines should be the place to find a good recipe or judge quality or authencity etc..
qbasic_forever 4y ago
That's what sites like allrecipes.com have been doing for years and years.

s1mon 4y ago

Searching for recipes turns out to be a great use for ChatGPT. You can give it pretty fuzzy search parameters and have conversations about adjusting the recipes and it will just give you a simple list of ingredients and instructions - no BS. Conversely, if you do want to use regular searches and recipes from internet sites, the Paprika app [0] is amazing. It will download and parse the recipes and get rid of all the BS. You can then sync recipes between devices and people as well as manage grocery lists and meal plans based on the recipes. [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/

_yb2s 4y ago
If you trust it not to 'hallucinate' a bad recipe no one would actually want to make.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

I've noticed a similar pattern in search results regarding anime series release dates. The main difference being that those anime articles seem entirely generated from templates.

Ekaros 4y ago

I would honestly guess that the blog text is point of the process and not the recipe for many of the writers. Maybe the recipe is just there to justify the process of writing the blog post. Or they would eventually be asked for the recipe, so get away having to repeatedly answer to same question.

bojangleslover 4y ago

https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/

destroy-2A 4y ago

Chat gpt is perfect for this you can add any variation you want no fluff or faff. Also I have to mention this http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

nluken 4y ago
ChatGPT also doesn't really understand the recipes it's giving you, so I don't know if I would trust it to make something tasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT8KoWpqUgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT8KoWpqUgg
alach11 4y ago
ChatGPT is the last thing I would use for recipe help (0). Instead I'd go with a reliable source like SeriousEats, NYTimes, or as you suggested, Cooking for Engineers. (0) - https://i.redd.it/8xvhkhxc495a1.png https://i.redd.it/8xvhkhxc495a1.png
- dicethrowaway1 4y ago
  That's awfully specific, I'm guessing it was preprompted.
- voytec 4y ago
  Now that's highly caloric!

cosinetau 4y ago

Beans do not belong in chili. They are probably writing so much in hopes you do not notice.

JasonFruit 4y ago
So true. And they left out the macaroni!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
photochemsyn 4y ago
An alternative opinion with a logical underpinning: 1) Chili is a dish most closely associated with the southwestern United States. 2) Among the most important cultivars of that region, dating back thousands of years, are: peppers, maize, squash, beans. This combination provides a complete mix of nutrients for a healthy diet. 3) Therefore, adding all those ingredients to chili in some form or other is entirely justifiable, as well as being historically accurate. Meat, on the other hand, is entirely optional.
- cosinetau 4y ago
  Can you help me corroborate your theory of historically accurate chili? I can not find any document supporting your "thousands of years" claim. It not hard to believe that native people dumped some of the earth's best vegetables into a pot and let them steep, but, I can not find _any_ support for your claim. I genuinely hope you enjoy your historically-accurate, bean-laden chili, but now I am suspicious; I know that LLMs can not really enjoy the richness in any chili.
  - VLM 4y ago
    This is the problem in a nutshell, do you define a "good recipe" as one that is historically accurate, that tastes good, or that follows various belief systems like not culturally appropriating or only culturally appropriating when you do a good job of it? Meanwhile the ad sales platform is going to define a "good recipe" as one that results in high click thru on ads they have contracts for. And add a side dish of the people doing the rating of how good the page is, specifically have zero skill in the field and are going to have intense normie middle of the road bias because on average they don't know anything. If you magically crowdsourced the averaged opinion of average folks about the General Theory of Relativity in 1900, would that result be useful and have beaten Einstein before he wrote it in 1915? The AI people think so; especially the ones who's paychecks depend on it; personally I have my doubts.

somecompanyguy 4y ago

the lore that know-nothings told themselves about seo. the think seo is about content, its about users. they screwed this pooch up over a decade ago and it noticeably changed the content of the internet for the worse, much like what people are now consciously thinking about chatgpt. its shocking that we finally have enough people to notice this but it wont be enough.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Google wills it so. Why? IDK, ask them. Probably yet another case of something net-harmful making them more money. Luckily it's also one of the only cases where a microformat is actually nigh-universally used. Outside a few sites where the "fluff" isn't fluff and is actually good content itself (e.g. Serious Eats) I just throw the URL into Paprika 3 (no affiliation, and there are tons of other programs and probably some browser plugins to do the same thing) and let it strip it down to the ingredients and instructions by reading the microformat markup. Works flawlessly nearly every time. [EDIT] Credit where it's due, I'm also pretty sure the microformat is only popular because of Google. I think they downrank sites in recipe searches if Google can't "see" the recipe, using the microformat. They may be both the cause of, and solution to, the problem.

Justin_K 4y ago
Trying to mentally parse these long winded recipes = takes longer to read = "greater engagement". These crappy recipes are all about seo and add placement as you'll notice these recipes are loaded with Google ads. So it is a self fulfilling prophecy that the pages where users spend more time and see more ads are ranked highest.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  I suspect theres also a halo effect. Like how select cuts of beef slow roasted with veggies and served on a bed of glazed hand cut potatoes. Is more appealing to a potential cook than cut beef in a slow cooker with some wedges.
- treeman79 4y ago
  I’ve completely given up on web recipes, and only use YouTube ones now. Most of the good recipes have a comment that has a condensed version of ingredients and instructions.
jxdxbx 4y ago
Yes. I think Google deserves a ton of credit for microformats, and you can just use a browser extension like Repibox that shows you only the recipe when you go to a recipe site. I think the reason Google wanted microformats is for Google Assistant recipe answers.

chiffre01 4y ago

The Internet Archive has hundreds of free to read cookbooks full of recipes with minimal or no additional story.

ravenstine 4y ago

Nearly everything online today is long-winded. Hell, most media is long-winded. You can't just know what happened, where, and why; you've got to read a creative-writing thesis to "put you in the shoes" of the subject du jour. You can't simply watch a lecture; you need fancy graphics and fast cuts with memes woven in. Want a compelling story? You better watch all 6 seasons, including the remaining 4 without the original writers, and be prepared to be disappointed. How about learning to fix your car? In that case, be prepared for 3 minutes worth of info in 20 minutes of some schmo complaining about why Hyundais suck while he constantly jiggles the camera and gloats about much more clever he is than other mechanics. News, blogs, recipes, shows, instructional videos... all pretty much blow chunks. Any time I simply want straight forward information it becomes a matter of frequent fast-forwarding and combining of info from disparate sources when it shouldn't be necessary. Get. To. The. Point.

kirkules 4y ago
It's easy to think all of the things you wanted to say were important, so you leave them in. But often they weren't so important to your eventual audience.
Pxtl 4y ago
Honestly I think this is part of the reason why Twitter was so successful for so long. The rest of the internet has become so padded for length (even streaming TV content -- how many shows have you watched where you thought "this would be better as a movie"?) one platform that demands you focus on being short, punchy, and getting straight to the point would obviously ascend.
- kibwen 4y ago
  And instead people make tweetchains a dozen long, making Twitter the worst of all worlds. It got better when they raised the cap from 140, but it's still too low to saying anything of substance or nuance.
  - Pxtl 4y ago

newobj 4y ago

Get the Paprika 3 app, it’s amazing. You can put in a irl and it scrapes the ingredients and directions and stores them locally.

akiselev 4y ago

Google measures the amount of time you spend on a webpage before you go back to the search page (if you dont open in a new tab) and it’s used as an important ranking signal. That’s pretty much it. All the long winded recipe bullshit just keeps you on the page longer before you realize the recipe is crap.

bottlepalm 4y ago

Long form content’s days are numbered with AI on the horizon. Th primary reason being generating long form has become so cheap with AI that it has essentially rendered it worthless.

julienchastang 4y ago
Speaking of AI, I think the image at the top of the blog post was generated by AI, maybe Stable Diffusion. I wonder what the prompt was.
VLM 4y ago
The problem will not be that the value of content will drop to zero, but that the value of asking someone else to ask ChatGPT for me and then wrap it in ads for me to view is very low compared to the inevitable result of I'll just ask ChatGPT or similar directly. Its the LMFGTFY or whatever the acronym for "let me google that for you" brought to ChatGPT topics. If, for example, as already seems to be the case, the news becomes nothing more than someone else generated algorithmic fluff mixed with censored propaganda that somehow ends up with lower trust metrics than actual email spam, why do I need someone to make that for me, just ask for my own copy. The future will not be CNN trying to lie to you and sell you stuff, it'll be the AI directly lying to you and trying to sell you stuff, CNN will no longer be a provider of value. Or MSNBC or Fox or BBC or your choice of propaganda outlet. The other side problem is if you want culinary excellence today you'll eventually find guidance to buy "modernist cuisine at home" or similar technical cookbooks or maybe some old Alton Brown TV show memes, but search engines are required by corporate to have total randos provide opinions about page quality and needs met that are going to be uneducated and thus generic/bland and are designed to select inoffensive bland middle of the road content, not excellent recipes. What appeals to children more, an animated skinner box / loot box paradise designed to attract their attention and lure them in, or a calculus textbook? If corporate goal is to maximize the former you'll get more of the former, but what if the latter is the only way to learn calculus? Well, you aint going to learn calculus, thats for sure. How AI / ChatGPT will avoid bland normie ignorance is an excellent question. How to provide bland middle of the road answers to bland middle of the road questions is essentially a solved problem; how to cook the best hamburger possible cannot be handled by that subculture where groupthink conforming to average blandness is the primary criteria enforced.

strig 4y ago

This chrome extension is helpful, shows the recipe automatically in a modal: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

Pigalowda 4y ago
I just tried it and it works well. Thanks for suggestion
fancy_pantser 4y ago
Thank you for mentioning my extension! I created it after a comment here on HN spurred me into action, finally fed up with long-winded recipe blogs.

christopherslee 4y ago

I'm sure there's some SEO component, but I'm surprised no one mentioned ads. More real estate for you to scroll through for display ads?

vharuck 4y ago
Point #3 from TFA mentions longer pages giving more space for ads. I agree, though. It's why I try going to websites run by people who make their money elsewhere. Like Food Network.
pellucidar 4y ago
Out of sight, out of mind, but they were mentioned a few times.

gaberunsalot 4y ago

Try the Fresco app.

photochemsyn 4y ago

There should be a standardized json format for recipies. Main keys for individual dishes could be 'ingredients', 'preparation', 'cooking', 'serving'.

tflinton 4y ago
There is, schema.org has a Recipe type that most recipe blogs will publish the recipe as a json object in script tags.

878654Tom 4y ago

Wouldn't this be the case of clean recipe websites just being rated lower as their content seeks like duplication while these long-winded websites have a lot of original content even though that original content is not what you are searching for. Like, a clean website about how to reverse sear a steak has maybe like 5 sentences and other clean websites write it the same for 90% (how many ways can you explain it?) but a website full of fluff has 200 sentences that are more original making the content look unique while they still describe how to reverse sear a steak.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Recipes on the internet are the worst mess, thousands of recipes for yellow cake that differ in ingredients and quantities for no discernable reason, someone's recipe for spanish rice made with taco bell sauce packets, macaroni and cheese with more mayonnaise then macaroni and cheese combined, and now the bloggers where you have to read through six pages of how the author used to make the recipe with their departed grandmother before getting to anything of substance. Instead I bought a used 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook from a used book store, beats Google every time.

h2odragon 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking
- jakebasile 4y ago
  I bought a copy of this for $20 recently. It has not failed me yet.
- bregma 4y ago
  That one hasn't been the same since newer editions took out the illustrated how-to-skin-a-squirrel entry.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    First catch your tiger.
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      substituting ingredients in recipes is a thing, but you can only stretch so far. how many recipes for tiger are there, anyway? i can't really see it working in place of squirrel except maybe in sausage and Squirrel Surprise
qbasic_forever 4y ago
The problem with old cookbooks is that ingredients and tastes change dramatically over the years. Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork. Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity. Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.

HlessClaudesman 4y ago

My longwinded crap filteiring heuristic: If an article hasn't gotten to the point by paragraph 3, I'm out.

ptsneves 4y ago
Great heuristic! Will try it out. I basically gave up on searching for recipes on google. I found that supermarket or store-websites often get down to the point and without ridiculously special ingredients for something as simple as a soup. I once looked for a beetroot soup recipe and was dumbfounded by the crazy spices and preparations required for something so simple. I always found that I never had the ingredients so I went ahead and tried to come up with the recipe myself. It makes me wonder how much actual knowledge is now buried or hard to find in the age of the internet. The irony of it all.

Aaronstotle 4y ago

One of my favorite uses of Chat GPT is asking it for recipes because it doesn't add a narrative

alach11 4y ago
The problem is ChatGPT recipes are (frequently) bad or (unlikely but possibly) dangerous. Maybe this will change as the service improves? For now though you'd be much better off using a low-fluff reliable source like SeriousEats or NYTimes.

dfxm12 4y ago

FWIW, a lot of top selling cookbooks are like this as well. Maybe there's not a blurb like this before every recipe, but I don't think I've got a cookbook that doesn't have at least some memoir or essay between sections and/or a few personal stories attached to recipes throughout.

tayo42 4y ago
It's not much of an issue though it's so quick and effortless to scan a page. And I like the background info in the cookbooks I have.

jihadjihad 4y ago

I saw it mentioned here on HN by the author themselves, and after using it for a few weeks it's been a game changer. If you're tired of reading a person's life story in a recipe, give Umami a shot. It's free, too. https://www.umami.recipes/ https://www.umami.recipes/

extr0pian 4y ago

Personally, I find the vast majority of recipe websites absolutely terrible. It seems others have shared small and minimalist recipe websites, but the one that I use and haven't seen shared yet is https://plain.recipes https://plain.recipes.

bmelton 4y ago

The conventional wisdom for SEO is that "good content" ranges between 2,000-4,000 words. Most recipes are but a fraction of that, so the rest is filler to meet the aforementioned SEO wisdom. I'm not sure whether Google actually does or doesn't reward content fitting with that arbitrary range, or why it might, but all the SEO Youtubers are saying it does, so all the people cargo culting SEO wisdom are doing it, so it doesn't really matter. More practically, the longer a piece of content appears to be, the more opportunities to stuff ads into it without appearing like a cash grab. Google does definitely reward users for including micro-slash-schema based content though, so the recipes themselves are likely included on the page in a parsable json+ld format, which is great for ingestion by apps like Paprika (which many others have mentioned.) The good news is that there are rumors that Google is moving away from whatever content-based system they may or may not have been using before, and towards a "helpfulness" system for ranking pages -- basically, how directly did this article address the search question that took you to it as the answer. This should prefer direct, concise answers (e.g., "2+2 = 4" vs "2+2 starts with the history of numbers, which are of course ciphered numeral systems originating with the Egyptians") Time will tell how accurately that can be measured, or what wild gamesmanship will occur as the result of it.

pjkundert 4y ago

We will soon have LLMs that: - aren’t infected by “Woke” theology (ie. accurately reflects the source material, not someone’s belief-based constraints) - prioritizes the sources that most succinctly explain the desired topic - And, sounds least like something generated by an LLM!

rogerbinns 4y ago

Plain recipes have no copyright protection[1]. The other surrounding text does have copyright protection, so any recipe publisher needs to have additional text and to be able to detect if someone else has copied it. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/

SamBam 4y ago
This is the answer that is always trotted out, but it's unclear whether there is any truth to it being the reason bloggers actually add the stories. Heck, if that were the reason they wouldn't need three pages of content they could have a single paragraph, it would come to the same thing. It never made any sense to me that recipe bloggers would need to resort to putting pages upon pages of detailed life history in every single post, just on the off chance that someone is going to steal their meatloaf recipe and re-post it on another blog. I was glad the OP article didn't mention that theory. I actually really believe that reason #1 in the article was the origin -- people actually liked reading the stories. When recipe blogs were new, and there were fewer of them, it was common to actually check back on the blogs and see if they had posted new content. I used to follow a number of recipe blogs, including Orangette, which I really liked, and would both read her stories and try her recipes. She (like similar bloggers) developed enough of a following that she was then hired by the Times to write similar recipes and stories. Heck, speaking of the Times, or other newspapers, they almost always intro a recipe with a story of some kind. This is not just for copyright reasons, but because people actually read them. (e.g. [1]) This audience is different from the one who just googles "Meatloaf recipe" and clicks on the one with the most stars. When you do that, then no, you generally don't want to hear the "life story." But maybe some readers do read it, it connects with them, and then they actually go back to that same site again. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/dining/citrus-salad-almond-cake-rice-casserole-recipes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/dining/citrus-salad-almon...
jxdxbx 4y ago
Recipes as in the steps to cook something, the algorithm, the steps and amounts and ingredients are not copyrightable. The TEXT of a recipe is, at least to the extent it is minimally creative.

erybodyknows 4y ago

A misalignment of incentives. Recipe sites want you to stay on the site for as long as possible, to serve you as many ads as possible, as this increases their income. Providing you with a clear recipe is not their primary goal.

H1Supreme 4y ago

For folks who often find themselves searching the web for recipes, I'd recommend picking up a cookbook or two. My girlfriend has a stack of them she's inherited from family members over the years. We like to casually leaf through them to look for ideas. I've come to prefer this method because it's effectively the opposite of searching for recipes. Here's a curated list of meals you can make, pick one. I'd recommend a used book store, if possible. You'll probably get some random Grandma notes in the margins for substitutions / modifications.

Our_Benefactors 4y ago
Cookbooks still have the same issue as an online recipe. Namely, you won’t know how good the recipe is until after you make it.
- sidlls 4y ago
  That's just the way cooking food works, regardless of the recipe source.
  - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
    Which makes the value proposition of cookbooks dubious!
    - Arrath 4y ago
      I have to heartily disagree. Besides, you're more than welcome to make changes to any given recipe (and even notate those changes in the book!)
      - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        I love online recipes. I can see what other people said about the recipe, and it’s more likely to be something contemporary. Many of the recipes in cookbooks “age out” as that style of cuisine goes out of style. See: 1950s recipes with jello.

weedking 4y ago

NYT recipes are a nice refuge from this sort of thing. Easy to get around the paywall with browser add-ons as well.

killtheweb 4y ago

[dead]

dinkleberg 4y ago

SEO may be the reason for many of the bigger blogs, but I think we shouldn't default to cynicism here. People who are passionate about a given topic often love to ramble on about it. And if you aren't very passionate about food, you aren't likely to start a food blog. And most people don't start blogging as a purely educational activity, but rather as a way of expressing themselves. As a result, they aren't necessarily thinking about optimal user experience like a software business would. I had a coworker who had a food blog and she would fill each post with ramblings like all the rest do, but it is because she wanted to tell her story of why that particular meal was important to her. And if you were to ask her in person about a meal or what she likes to cook, she would talk in as much detail since that was her passion. The default of assuming everyone is a bad actor is growing rather tiresome. Not to mention, these people didn't need to share their recipes at all. And we aren't compensating them for their work. We just complain.

schnable 4y ago
Agreed, but in this case the outside incentives align with the passion, thus making this style proliferate.

byronic 4y ago

I got so mad about this exact behavior that I started an (occasionally-updated) git repository with no-cruft recipes. https://github.com/byronic/recipes https://github.com/byronic/recipes

sharx 4y ago

these days there is almost always a "jump to recipe" button at the top in my experience

sct202 4y ago
The buttons kind of blend in sometimes since they're next to the social media buttons. It's pretty wild that like the vast majority of sibling comments are about apps and scrapers, when there are already on-page solutions.

iambateman 4y ago

I had the same question, so I made https://SimplifyRecipe.com https://SimplifyRecipe.com a few weeks ago! There’s an iOS shortcut and chrome extension to reliably get rid of the life story. Hope it’s useful. :)

yafbum 4y ago

Because the people publishing them love to pack them with ads, and long-windedness causes more ad impressions.

readingnews 4y ago

I think you mean "why is everything online so long-winded". Geez, look up any video on nearly anything simple, they all follow the same format: * 10 mins of nonsense and irrelevant background into how great you are * 10 mins of setup * 10 mins of drama build-up * 1 min of the actual event * 10 mins of closing comments Oh, wait, I forgot, it is not about the content, it is all about how long I can get you to watch so I get more nickels. Dang, now I made myself sad...

Chirael 4y ago
Don’t forget to like and subscribe
maximus-decimus 4y ago
Also applies to self help books. There's 10 pages of content, but people won't pay $40 for 10 pages so you gotta fill it with 190 pages of nonsense and spread the content around to the point of making it useless.
- passwordoops 4y ago
  Something something storytelling
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Interestingly they provide 180 pages of filler to give a 10 page summary of Buddhism which is itself captured in 57 dense volumes of content. That level of compression gives you an indication of how valuable a self help book will be. https://archive.org/details/dhatukatha-pts/182706089-Udana-and-Itivuttaka-tr-Ireland-pdf/page/183/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/dhatukatha-pts/182706089-Udana-a...
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    You could argue that a ten-page "summary" of Buddhism is long-winded, and that if you can't convey the essence with a glance, then you're finger-painting.

Eleison23 4y ago

[dead]

martin_a 4y ago

SEO. That's it. Done. No need to read another article about it.

delecti 4y ago

Most recipe pages also include links directly to the recipe right at the top. The blog portion is annoying, and also leads to some funny memes, but it's easy to bypass.

kraussvonespy 4y ago

Opposite opinion here: Internet recipes are generally terrible. It's almost impossible to make any determination as to whether recipes have ever been tested or optimized or anything, and I just don't trust them. But if I go to seriouseats.com (for example) and they show me all of the work they went through to get to the recipe, I trust them. I'd say that well over half of the random Internet recipes I try aren't very good, have been developed with bad techniques, use the wrong flavors, try to fix flavor issues by adding more flavors and so on. Using a vetted site (the America's Test Kitchen recipes are also quite good) gets me ~98% success. I'd rather take the extra 5 minutes of time to look through how the recipe was created and tested to make sure it's a good recipe than spend a couple of hours making an unknown recipe with a 50/50 shot to not be terrible. YMMV.

ben7799 4y ago
ATK does some amazing stuff. Their gluten free baking concepts in their cookbook are like a decade ahead of most of the gluten free products you can buy at the store. Crazy stuff.
- kraussvonespy 4y ago
  That's a great tip! I'm getting more dinner guests with gluten issues and would like to get better at that side of cooking. Is there a good place (cookbook) to start with?
jerf 4y ago
I just use internet recipes for ideas more than anything else. Yesterday the wife's dinner instructions were "we have chicken and sweet potatoes", and I didn't feel like just cooking them directly. So I googled around a bit and came up with https://www.self.com/gallery/non-boring-ways-to-eat-chicken-and-sweet-potatoes https://www.self.com/gallery/non-boring-ways-to-eat-chicken-... , no particular recommendation here, just posting that to show that I ultimately saw the picture for the "buffalo chicken sweet potatos" and made something based on that idea. I didn't even look at the recipe. In fact, I only just now noticed that the picture went with #4 and not #3. (Looking at the recipe now, I didn't even guess the ingredients from the picture correctly.) And what was nice isn't that I made something amazing, it's more that I made something that was good, and wasn't our usual fare. It's not something I would normally have done. The internet is pretty decent at that. If you've been cooking long enough to read a recipe and just take a few ideas here and there, I find it very helpful. But it's been a long time since I pulled a recipe from the internet and carefully made it exactly as described. There's a lot of people with tastes quite different than mine, and somewhat more judgmentally, there's a lot of people out there with no taste posting their recipes. On the Internet, nobody knows you have the culinary tastes of a dog.

kemiller2002 4y ago

It's because recipes aren't copy writable. Stories are. If you include the story then it's much harder to scrape the recipe.

indymike 4y ago

SEO. Recipes are a great place to learn how bad SEO makes content for people.

nottorp 4y ago

Without reading the article, it's because I have yet to see a recipe that's not on a blogspam site.

AlbertCory 4y ago

My new go-to is not to search DDG or Google at all. Just go to seriouseats.com and search there. America's Test Kitchen is a good second choice. There IS a lot of text, but it's mostly explaining how they tested and derived this recipe, and what the alternatives are. You can always skip to the end.

sshadow 4y ago

This reads like the pages they're talking about.

4monthsaway 4y ago
Read it until the end

tuckerpo 4y ago

Luke Smith, the FOSS + minimalism evangelist has a platform to solve this: https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ Shortform, straight to the point recipes. Just ingredients and steps. No ads. No life stories.

Pxtl 4y ago
Nice lightweight site, but I don't tend to trust recipes that don't have any feedback from people who've attempted it. Which, of course, leads to the review-spam problem.

baud147258 4y ago

I'm finding weird that it's not the case for recipes in French... Like the first result for 'soupe à l'oignon' on google is this one: https://www.marmiton.org/recettes/recette_soupe-a-l-oignon_10891.aspx https://www.marmiton.org/recettes/recette_soupe-a-l-oignon_1... and it's similar for all the recipes I search for online (in French). It's full of ads and sponsored content, but the recipe is ingredient list and instructions. Maybe it's because all the recipes seem to be concentrated on a handful of big websites with thousands of recipes, which fits with part '#3. It’s a business' of the article.

Planktonne 4y ago

It's been a very long time since I've visited a recipe site that didn't have a prominent 'jump to recipe' button. Recipes have stories because some people value them, and they have a button for those who don't. This is a tired, old complaint made by people who don't actually ever cook or read recipes, they just want to shop AI solutions / flog their 'innovative' start-up / write about a different topic entirely but draw readers in initially with a 'kids these days' tone.

daveguy 4y ago
Sites have stories because recipes cannot be copyrighted, but stories can.
- Planktonne 4y ago
  That is one of the reasons for some of those stories, sure. However, the specifics of reasons have basically nothing to do with the trend of tech evangelists making the same tedious and inaccurate arguments again and again. In this article, the blogger decrying the practice links to a recipe blogger who's already covered the same ground more efficiently; this isn't even hot air. 'Why do tech bloggers always use this outdated example to pad things' is a better and far more original question.

dawnerd 4y ago

Oh hey, something I have first hand experience with working with fairly large food / recipe focused sites. It's primarily driven by ads. I know, huge shock there. A lot of people might assume it's purely an SEO play and while that's true to an extent, it's mostly for the ads.

radley 4y ago
Yeah, I figured ad space plus engagement stats. By placing the recipe at the bottom of a long page, they can show multiple ads. Viewers will have to engage longer, demonstrating greater relevancy and interest by scrolling to the end of the page.

gr4yb34rd 4y ago

i really do not like being the guy that goes "but chatgpt" in threads about other topics, but i have found it to be pretty good at generating simplified recipes.

mkl95 4y ago

Some guy at Google decided it was the way to go almost 20 years ago, and it was cargoculted into oblivion

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

ad placement /thread

daniel-s 4y ago

https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ The best recipe website on the internet. Is the best and doesn't rank on Google specifically because it doesn't do what this article talks about.

jefftk 4y ago
It's a nice site, but I think the main reason it's not popular is that it doesn't have pictures. People like to see pictures before cooking.

graeme 4y ago

I am amazed the article and the comments do not mention copyright. 1. You can’t copyright a recipe 2. You can copyright the text of a long winded story which contains a recipe Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

TehShrike 4y ago
I've heard this explanation before but it sounds like one of those "it sounds plausible, so people will keep repeating it" explanations. I suspect the real reason is what the author of the post claims – Google sends more readers to articles with lots of fluff. > This food blogger wrote about an experiment she conducted. She listened to some of her readers and actually tried just putting the recipe up top before everything else. All of the articles in her experiment went lower in the rankings.
- graeme 4y ago
  Oh, to be clear: I agree! Google also rewards the fluff, you can show more ads, etc But the copyright is part of the equation and it deserves a mention. Also, part of google rankings is manual quality review, familiarity, etc. if a recipe site strongly diverges from the normal form it can confuse readers or quality rankers. The lack of copyright to a degree has influenced the form that is now industry standard.
noworld 4y ago
Weird thought - you can't copyright a recipe, but could you patent one?
- nkurz 4y ago
  Generally no. It's technically possible, but very few recipes would qualify for patent protection. Here's a decent summary article: Can I patent a recipe? The simple answer is no. While it is technically possible to obtain a patent on certain recipes, the likelihood and rate of patents being granted for recipes is so low that it is almost pointless to try and obtain one unless you own a chain of restaurants or are looking to franchise your business. The effort required to protect intellectual property, such as a secret recipe or cooking process, is so great, and there are so many hurdles one must clear, that the ends hardly justify the means. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-recipes-trade-secrets-and-patents.html https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-...

deleted 4y ago

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hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Saw a tweet recently where someone took a long-winded recipe from a website, posted it to ChatGPT and asked ChatGPT to play it back, taking out all the fluff and making it succinct. Result was perfect, just an ingredients list and simple instructions, no mistakes.

meowzero 4y ago

Everything is long winded these days: books, recipes, podcasts, videos, blogs, etc. Even with tiktoks, they try to use the maximum amount of time for their content.

rreichel03 4y ago

I found that this was particularly notable while browsing on my phone so I built an iOS app extension [1] a year ago that attempts to fix this! Its not perfect and always a WIP, but its made my friends and family's lives a lot easier. [1]. https://recipereader.reichel.dev https://recipereader.reichel.dev

Reason077 4y ago

This is why I love www.bbcgoodfood.com. Good quality recipes. Short and too the point, usually just 1-2 pages. No ads or silly long winded stories. Long live public service media!

Tams80 4y ago

Eh? I just stick to a few sites that have more recipes than I could likely ever cook, and despite being adventurous, I won't ever cook all of them. BBC Food BBC Good Food Cookpad The odd The Guardian recipe (which are full of fluff) I'm sure others can point you to other sites that just have recipes.

jefftk 4y ago

Very impressive that this post itself is a 1000-word introduction to a chili recipe.

rapsacnz 4y ago

I generally try to find Jamie Oliver versions of recipes - they are short, tested and they taste good.

numeromancer 4y ago

You might like this: https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/

Trowter 4y ago

People on this forum will not like this opinion but I think TikTok is the superior recipe platform. If you already know the basics on how to cook it's great. Quick fire ingredients and methods with visuals to back it up, I can absorb an entire recipe in less than 30 seconds. I have an account dedicated to recipes and they algorithm is pretty good and will pretty much only ever show me recipes or similar nutrition based stuff.

valarauko 4y ago
I think TikTok wouldn't work for most people for recipes. Short format aside, it's a great visual aid for sure, but I personally find the utility limited. It's alright for limited ingredients & steps with forgiving proportions, but I think it breaks down beyond that. I suppose it helps to temper expectations, though. Cacio e pepe? Sure. Baking recipe with multiple unforgiving precise measurements and temperatures? Not so much - for most people.

srcreigh 4y ago

Even the worst recipe sites often have a "Jump to recipe" button to skip past the story and ads. pihole works decently well to stop ads from loading on mobile, speeding up the site and avoiding janky movement of the copy as ads load in.

yibg 4y ago

Interestingly I noticed this a while ago and in talking to some friends it seems this is less of a problem in some other languages. For example Chinese recipes and Thai receipes (in Chinese and Thai) seem to get straight to the point. Where as most English recipes I find on google takes page 3 to get to the meat of it.

harrywynn 4y ago

I spent a few hours this past weekend putting my own recipes up for exactly this reason. Just give me the info. https://gluten-free.recipes https://gluten-free.recipes

kazinator 4y ago

To keep your eyes on the page longer so you are exposed to ads more.

jedberg 4y ago

The irony of a long blog post about this is not lost on me. The answer is simple: "SEO. Google favors longer pages with unique content. If you just put the recipe it would look just like every other recipe on every other page".

withinrafael 4y ago

A simple set of directions is uncopyrightable. (https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf) Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by "substantial literary expression." (https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html)

_aavaa_ 4y ago
The whole of the article may be copyrightable, but the actual recipe and ingredients remains uncopyrightable. From you first link: > However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself.

jollyllama 4y ago

I figured it was to incentivize you to buy a cookbook or recipe catalogue without the ranting.

resuresu 4y ago

based.cooking

WorldMaker 4y ago

Bullet point #1 here doesn't get enough credit either in this article or generally here on HN comments, but is a major factor. A lot of the recipe blogs that originated this form of long-winded stories leading into the eventual recipe have regular readers. Many of those readers aren't looking for specific recipes at any given time they are looking for the stories first. Those stories are the real content to those regular readers. (And regular readers with their recurring ad revenue/demographics are the ones that pay the bills, ultimately, not "went searching for a specific recipe" utilitarian users.) This isn't even a new phenomenon in recipes pop culture, because food TV shows learned this decades ago. Most cooking shows break down into two categories: competitions (which mostly never even give recipes) and "lifestyle" shows that may include recipes but just as much include the "celebrity chefs" chatting as much about who they are and what is going on in their lives and storytelling why the recipes in question were of interest in that moment as much as the details of the recipes themselves. This isn't even an isolated phenomenon to recipes. It is common, modern parasocial behavior. You could look at something like Twitch as a utilitarian resource to see gameplay or learn tips/tricks, but obviously nearly every stream is full of streamers chatting about their day while they wait for game lobbies or in between other parts of gameplay and whatever tips/tricks they may have to impart. It's the parasocial "human interest" that builds the biggest and most reliable parts of their audiences (and in turn most of their revenue). There are a lot of reasons people complain about it a lot more with recipe bloggers than Twitch streamers.

hector_vasquez 4y ago
The true outrage isn't that the 0.01% of recipe seekers who like to read a story and get served 77 ads as they scroll through and laugh/cry before the recipe get these recipes high in Google's search results. It's that the rest of us who HATE ALL THAT also get these abhorrent search results.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  If 100% of regular blog readers want that story and that makes up 98% of your ad revenue, it doesn't matter what percentage of outside ad hoc search engine traffic don't want that story. You aren't wrong to feel "outrage" as that external random visitor with no interest in the blog except for one single random recipe, but you aren't the target audience, sorry.

zerocrates 4y ago

I've never quite understood why people hate this trend so much. The fluff is often overdone, agreed, but when you don't want that stuff, just scroll down until you hit ingredients and you're good to go.

ano-ther 4y ago

If Google rewards the fluff, couldn’t the authors put it after the actual recipe? I.e., tldr; first and then the backstory?

fleddr 4y ago

So let us imagine an ideal situation from a recipe consumer point of view. You go to Google, type "best chili recipe", and Google would immediately show the best recipe directly into its UI, based on all the data is has on you and some sophisticated recommendation algorithm. Further, you have a set of standardized actions like "print", "send to iPad", "favorite", etc. You no longer have to read the author's diary entry and this entire hyper-optimized workflow doesn't cost you a cent. Perfect, right? Well, I suppose that in these AI times ultimately the effort of even asking the question would be redundant, obviously Google knows Wednesday is your chili day, and your fridge had already ordered the ingredient. There's just one problem: what about the recipe writers? What about artists? What about anybody ever producing any content of monetizable value? What incentive is there to produce content when users never pay directly and middlemen aggregate it, removing you from the equation? You, the person that created the bloody thing. It's like you don't even exist. This isn't just big tech, we have an active role in this. When users do not have to pay, they generally won't. Digital content has no value yet we obviously have the natural born right to consume it anyway.

shrx 4y ago
Why do you feel everything needs to be monetized? You don't need to be compensated for sharing a recipe online, you can upload it just because you like the outcome so much that you want others to try it too.
- fleddr 4y ago
  "Why do you feel everything needs to be monetized?" You should ask Google that. Because they're the one actually monetizing. It's like a money printer with everybody's content as free fuel. I didn't say everything needs to be monetized. I'm saying that there's content that requires to be monetized (otherwise the content will simply not be produced) and content where the producer will attempt to monetize it because they believe it has monetary value. Surely it's up to the content producer to decide on monetization and not you. If you believe a recipe is worthless and not worthy of payment, yet then still continue to consume it regardless by bypassing any attempt at monetization, you're a hypocrite. Either it is worthless or it isn't. You can't have it both ways. Or well, on the internet you can, and that is exactly the problem. Don't take it as a personal attack. Our internet culture is hypocritical. It's a WE thing and I include myself in it. The internet we have is of our own making and our own behavior.

danielvaughn 4y ago

Online recipes were the catalyst for me switching from Chrome to Brave. It doesn't remove the filler copy, but at least there's not an ad every 2 sentences.

kgc 4y ago

More ad targeting possibilities.

deleted 4y ago

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RedditKon 4y ago

SEO - Google ranks those pages higher.

de_nied 4y ago

> I think the only potential fix to something like this is one of the hardest to overcome—brand name. If you’re searching for Gordan Ramsay’s Jammed Turkey or Rachael Ray’s Glimmering Sunflower Seeds, they can probably get away with 0% fluff content. The rest of us humble content creators probably cannot (until we’re dining with the stars, that is.) [query site:.edu] gives me the base of any recipe I need, mostly without the fluff.

mattpallissard 4y ago

Scrapes the site for just the steps. Works pretty well too. https://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/