4 ms·

Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story. Merely copying

by graeme 4y ago

Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story. Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller.

luckylion 4y ago
That's mostly not what the recipe sites do though, they're not writing a long-winded story where you need to read carefully to decipher the actual ingredients. They're giving you 500 words of unrelated bullshit and then the recipe. If I recall correctly there are already SaaS which run on ML models to extract the actual recipe from text, and you could use those to get the data. Plus who really cares about individual recipes from randomblog.com, they rarely have anything new, just the 50000001 re-publishing of a traditional recipe.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
> Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story It's also objectively a harder to follow recipe (i.e. a worse one). But that isn't even what recipe sites too. Open up google search type in a dish name and hit "I'm feeling lucky". I just did it for "mushroom Alfredo", you won't believe what happened next. - The first thing below the subtitle is a "Jump to recipe" button. - What gets jumped is 6 screen widths of rambling interspersed with highly produced photos, 3/4 of which are clearly advertising shots for the company that sponsored this particular recipe. The fact that the very first thing is a "jump to recipe" button indicates to me that even the author knows that you (the reader) want the recipe and not whatever they're about to ramble about. So why include it then? It's certainly not about copyright, the author is actively helping you not read it. The conclusion that makes the most sense to me is that the text is there to a) sell as advertising space for food-related sponsors and b) for SEO (go read through the sentences, each one seems crafted to hit on a different reason why someone might search for this recipe). > Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller. It's true, but slap a celebrity's face on the cover, ghost write (or even chatgpt) a few hundred words of intro before each book and BAM you have a stereotipical book in the cooking section.

by graeme 4y ago

luckylion 4y ago

That's mostly not what the recipe sites do though, they're not writing a long-winded story where you need to read carefully to decipher the actual ingredients. They're giving you 500 words of unrelated bullshit and then the recipe. If I recall correctly there are already SaaS which run on ML models to extract the actual recipe from text, and you could use those to get the data. Plus who really cares about individual recipes from randomblog.com, they rarely have anything new, just the 50000001 re-publishing of a traditional recipe.

_aavaa_ 4y ago

> Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story It's also objectively a harder to follow recipe (i.e. a worse one). But that isn't even what recipe sites too. Open up google search type in a dish name and hit "I'm feeling lucky". I just did it for "mushroom Alfredo", you won't believe what happened next. - The first thing below the subtitle is a "Jump to recipe" button. - What gets jumped is 6 screen widths of rambling interspersed with highly produced photos, 3/4 of which are clearly advertising shots for the company that sponsored this particular recipe. The fact that the very first thing is a "jump to recipe" button indicates to me that even the author knows that you (the reader) want the recipe and not whatever they're about to ramble about. So why include it then? It's certainly not about copyright, the author is actively helping you not read it. The conclusion that makes the most sense to me is that the text is there to a) sell as advertising space for food-related sponsors and b) for SEO (go read through the sentences, each one seems crafted to hit on a different reason why someone might search for this recipe). > Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller. It's true, but slap a celebrity's face on the cover, ghost write (or even chatgpt) a few hundred words of intro before each book and BAM you have a stereotipical book in the cooking section.