4 ms·

Google pruned their index so radically that it doesn't make a difference anymore. For a bit less common stuff, but yet nothing esoteric, I get to the last page

Google pruned their index so radically that it doesn't make a difference anymore. For a bit less common stuff, but yet nothing esoteric, I get to the last page around page 4 or 5. And most of the stuff on those 5 pages are mostly SEO-farm copies of the same stuff. I quit looking for recipes on google. Bought a dozen of recipe books last year. fuck that shit.

marak830 3y ago
As an ex chef, escoffier as a basis, then salt fat acid heat by Samin nosrat. Recipes are a guide for unfamiliar, but once you learn the profiles of each ingredient you can expand greatly. I know it's a bit off your comments and I certainly search myself for new basis to play with, but I hope it helps :-)
- esafak 3y ago
  Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat opened my eyes; it showed me an insightful way to deconstruct flavor and therefore the building blocks to construct it. Highly recommended!
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Respectfully this is obnoxious advice for the majority of home cooks. We just want to know what to cook and how.
  - spdif899 3y ago
    Yeah those books are definitely great and the building blocks Nosrat provides are crucial for any home chef that wants to take a scientific approach to decision making in the kitchen. But most of the time, I just want to pick a recipe as a starting point
  - gumby 3y ago
    It’s the opposite. There’s nothing wrong at all with “cook by numbers” and it’s especially great if you didn’t learn to cook as a child. It’s like learning at a coding boot camp where you learn to write some simple business logic based on a spec, or learning algebra in grade 8: basically syntactic transforms with no theory. But Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach you to look in the fridge when you’re hungry but unmotivated and quickly make something from what happens to be there that isn’t boring, faster and cheaper than ordering junk food delivery. Yes you could turn into a fancy chef but the suggested advice is great for someone like me, who doesn’t really care particularly about food.
    - pinkcan 3y ago
      1. that comment is not about you 2. don't tell people their perception of things is wrong, instead consider why they're perceiving things that way, and if you can, do something* that may change their perception * here, you can't
    - Spivak 3y ago
      In fact I would go further and say that this stuff is more fundamental. Online recipes make cooking look mysterious and complicated when they're actually "cook each ingredient in the obvious way, measure with your heart, combine the things that go together, and assemble the final dish." It's not "easy just re-derive the formula when you need it" like you see in maths, it's that most dishes you don't need a recipe at all. Baking is the only thing that requires some science know-how but it has its own building blocks [1] that demystify overly complicated recipes. There aren't that many "shapes" of dishes. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728 https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/...
    - testacct22 3y ago
      This is true for me. Been making a lot of soups and soup like dishes, most have a similar profile: 1. Saute aromatic base (like onion, garlic, pepper, celery etc) 2. Deglaze 3. Add meats, non aromatic vegetables (e.g. carrot, potato) 4. Add broth, simmer 5. Garnish
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    I used to think like that but then I expanded my skills during the pandemic. I now have a much better grasp of ingredients and spices and how they all interact with each other. All it took was asking “why” a specific ingredient was used at a specific stage in the recipe. You get a lot of answers from that.
  - naet 3y ago
    For me personally as a home cook I do best when I learn some of the concepts and then I can use whatever I have instead of trying to get a bunch of specific ingredients. For example one of my staples is braised chicken and vegetables. I know I can use any of certain vegetables I might have (mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, potatoes or sweet potatoes, shallots, etc), any of a couple liquids (water, chicken or vegetable stock, red or white wine, beer, etc) and spice it up with (heavy cream, fresh or dried herbs, mustard, garlic, pepper, bacon, butter, lemon, etc). And I know roughly how I want to cook it: flour the chicken and cook until brown and crispy in a pan, take it out and brown any firmer vegetables, add some spices, add the rest of the vegetables and my cooking liquid and bring to a small boil, put everything in a big oven dish, pop the chicken on top, bake at around 400 for 30-50 minutes until the chicken seems done, add any last things that might burn like cream in the final 5 minutes and then plate up and eat. Now I don't have to go to the store and look for anything, don't have to worry too much about measuring ingredients, don't have to worry about cook time or technique. I can whip up a big family dinner pretty quickly with whatever I have on hand and experiment a bit with different flavors with confidence that it will turn out good.
  - timacles 3y ago
    It’s not even just obnoxious. It’s also just terrible advice even master chefs need to be exposed to a recipe to to know which ingredients to combine… to expect a home-cook to just come up with recipes at Homefr f is ridiculous. They’re just gonna end up cooking the same three or four things that they’ve been exposed to.
joker_minmax 3y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed it's harder to find recipes from smaller sites anymore.
- dustymcp 3y ago
  I have been using openAI for this, its surprisingly accurate, and way faster for easy recipes and instructions.
  - threads2 3y ago
    We won a set of fancy cast iron pans and gpt explained to us what each of them are for. Way better experience than googling or reading wikipedia.
    - joker_minmax 3y ago
      What made the experience better to you? I would feel compelled to Google search everything after the fact to make sure it wasn't lying to me.
      - Saturn5 3y ago
        For me at least, I sometimes find it very difficult to google information I don’t yet know a lot about. It is very difficult if you don’t know the jargon to find anything that goes beyond the very surface level. Or if you did find the correct word, it goes too fast and you are not able to follow. It can be difficult to find an article in the “goldilocks zone” where I can follow along but also learn a lot. I do not do this, but I can imagine that AI could help with that as a starting of point. Then I would probably still google to confirm.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        > I would feel compelled to Google search everything after the fact to make sure it wasn't lying to me https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-onions-and-blam-1793057789 https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-... >I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it—and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard. Trusting Google is just as apt to get you in trouble.
rosewater 3y ago
If anyone has tips for how they personally deal with this, I’d be grateful! The drop-off in results has been extremely pronounced for me, both for text and image search. Queries that should easily generate dozens of pages instead result in 1-3. The results are rarely what I’m looking for. It’s slowly been driving me crazy. At this point, l’ve switched to mostly using individual site’s search functionality (GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc or using site: ) and bookmarking/taking notes on anything more obscure. I’m at a point where I’m tempted to scrape and index my bookmarks so I can search locally. Link discovery is a different matter of course.
cyanydeez 3y ago
They just stopped indexing. I believe they basically just figured out how to cut their database to cater to as companies then just crawl only keywords

marak830 3y ago

As an ex chef, escoffier as a basis, then salt fat acid heat by Samin nosrat. Recipes are a guide for unfamiliar, but once you learn the profiles of each ingredient you can expand greatly. I know it's a bit off your comments and I certainly search myself for new basis to play with, but I hope it helps :-)

esafak 3y ago
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat opened my eyes; it showed me an insightful way to deconstruct flavor and therefore the building blocks to construct it. Highly recommended!
mvdtnz 3y ago
Respectfully this is obnoxious advice for the majority of home cooks. We just want to know what to cook and how.
- spdif899 3y ago
  Yeah those books are definitely great and the building blocks Nosrat provides are crucial for any home chef that wants to take a scientific approach to decision making in the kitchen. But most of the time, I just want to pick a recipe as a starting point
- gumby 3y ago
  It’s the opposite. There’s nothing wrong at all with “cook by numbers” and it’s especially great if you didn’t learn to cook as a child. It’s like learning at a coding boot camp where you learn to write some simple business logic based on a spec, or learning algebra in grade 8: basically syntactic transforms with no theory. But Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach you to look in the fridge when you’re hungry but unmotivated and quickly make something from what happens to be there that isn’t boring, faster and cheaper than ordering junk food delivery. Yes you could turn into a fancy chef but the suggested advice is great for someone like me, who doesn’t really care particularly about food.
  - pinkcan 3y ago
    1. that comment is not about you 2. don't tell people their perception of things is wrong, instead consider why they're perceiving things that way, and if you can, do something* that may change their perception * here, you can't
  - Spivak 3y ago
    In fact I would go further and say that this stuff is more fundamental. Online recipes make cooking look mysterious and complicated when they're actually "cook each ingredient in the obvious way, measure with your heart, combine the things that go together, and assemble the final dish." It's not "easy just re-derive the formula when you need it" like you see in maths, it's that most dishes you don't need a recipe at all. Baking is the only thing that requires some science know-how but it has its own building blocks [1] that demystify overly complicated recipes. There aren't that many "shapes" of dishes. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728 https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/...
  - testacct22 3y ago
    This is true for me. Been making a lot of soups and soup like dishes, most have a similar profile: 1. Saute aromatic base (like onion, garlic, pepper, celery etc) 2. Deglaze 3. Add meats, non aromatic vegetables (e.g. carrot, potato) 4. Add broth, simmer 5. Garnish
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  I used to think like that but then I expanded my skills during the pandemic. I now have a much better grasp of ingredients and spices and how they all interact with each other. All it took was asking “why” a specific ingredient was used at a specific stage in the recipe. You get a lot of answers from that.
- naet 3y ago
  For me personally as a home cook I do best when I learn some of the concepts and then I can use whatever I have instead of trying to get a bunch of specific ingredients. For example one of my staples is braised chicken and vegetables. I know I can use any of certain vegetables I might have (mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, potatoes or sweet potatoes, shallots, etc), any of a couple liquids (water, chicken or vegetable stock, red or white wine, beer, etc) and spice it up with (heavy cream, fresh or dried herbs, mustard, garlic, pepper, bacon, butter, lemon, etc). And I know roughly how I want to cook it: flour the chicken and cook until brown and crispy in a pan, take it out and brown any firmer vegetables, add some spices, add the rest of the vegetables and my cooking liquid and bring to a small boil, put everything in a big oven dish, pop the chicken on top, bake at around 400 for 30-50 minutes until the chicken seems done, add any last things that might burn like cream in the final 5 minutes and then plate up and eat. Now I don't have to go to the store and look for anything, don't have to worry too much about measuring ingredients, don't have to worry about cook time or technique. I can whip up a big family dinner pretty quickly with whatever I have on hand and experiment a bit with different flavors with confidence that it will turn out good.
- timacles 3y ago
  It’s not even just obnoxious. It’s also just terrible advice even master chefs need to be exposed to a recipe to to know which ingredients to combine… to expect a home-cook to just come up with recipes at Homefr f is ridiculous. They’re just gonna end up cooking the same three or four things that they’ve been exposed to.

joker_minmax 3y ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed it's harder to find recipes from smaller sites anymore.

dustymcp 3y ago
I have been using openAI for this, its surprisingly accurate, and way faster for easy recipes and instructions.
- threads2 3y ago
  We won a set of fancy cast iron pans and gpt explained to us what each of them are for. Way better experience than googling or reading wikipedia.
  - joker_minmax 3y ago
    What made the experience better to you? I would feel compelled to Google search everything after the fact to make sure it wasn't lying to me.
    - Saturn5 3y ago
      For me at least, I sometimes find it very difficult to google information I don’t yet know a lot about. It is very difficult if you don’t know the jargon to find anything that goes beyond the very surface level. Or if you did find the correct word, it goes too fast and you are not able to follow. It can be difficult to find an article in the “goldilocks zone” where I can follow along but also learn a lot. I do not do this, but I can imagine that AI could help with that as a starting of point. Then I would probably still google to confirm.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      > I would feel compelled to Google search everything after the fact to make sure it wasn't lying to me https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-onions-and-blam-1793057789 https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-... >I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it—and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard. Trusting Google is just as apt to get you in trouble.

rosewater 3y ago

If anyone has tips for how they personally deal with this, I’d be grateful! The drop-off in results has been extremely pronounced for me, both for text and image search. Queries that should easily generate dozens of pages instead result in 1-3. The results are rarely what I’m looking for. It’s slowly been driving me crazy. At this point, l’ve switched to mostly using individual site’s search functionality (GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc or using site: ) and bookmarking/taking notes on anything more obscure. I’m at a point where I’m tempted to scrape and index my bookmarks so I can search locally. Link discovery is a different matter of course.

cyanydeez 3y ago

They just stopped indexing. I believe they basically just figured out how to cut their database to cater to as companies then just crawl only keywords