8 ms·

It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect: > You can tell just by looking at the URLs that

It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect: > You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam. At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs. The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.

tonyarkles 2y ago
I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
- fancy_pantser 2y ago
  I got so fed up with this that I made a browser extension for it. It's in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox as well, but you'll have to build the xcode project in the Safari directory if that's your preferred browser. https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
- mitemte 2y ago
  I generally use https://www.taste.com.au https://www.taste.com.au. No bullshit prologue about how a distant relative used to make the recipe in question. Just and overview, photo ingredients and steps. Everything else is secondary and usually worthless.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Hmmm. First one I clicked from their home page: https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5xqtd https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x... > When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ... Just No.
    - olddustytrail 2y ago
      That's not a recipe, it's a short intro to a list of recipes. Just Learn To Read.
      - michaelmrose 2y ago
        "Just Learn To Read" adds nothing to the sentence that precedes it. The point was already made correctly and well. You should avoid when possible starting a comment you want to actually be read with an insult or ending it with a snap. It degrades the quality of the conversation.
        olddustytrail 2y ago
        I really don't care.
      - justinclift 2y ago
        > it's a [...] intro to a list of recipes That's exactly the point. It doesn't need to be there, doesn't add any value whatsoever, etc. ;)
  - beretguy 2y ago
    Why when i try to click that link it links me to tags.news.com.ua ? My dns filters are blocking it.
- throwup238 2y ago
  The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once all the SEO vampires figured it out, everyone started to pile on prologues to all their content, not just recipe sites. In my experience that was the beginning of the end. Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kqr 2y ago
    Yup. This is the Long Click metric. Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for? If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up? The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower. (This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.) I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!
    - plank 2y ago
      One idea, but people will probably hate me for it: If you return to e.g. the google search site (hence: when the long click metric would be triggered) have a dialog on top saying ‘result great / OK / bad-or-confusing’. Can probably be gamed (bot nets trying to destroy the reputation of others) but at least a long time would not automatically mean ‘great result’. (In the arms race to combat destruction, it could be so that a ‘bad-or-confusing’ click would not actually push a value down, just not make it go higher). Kind regards, Roel
- devsda 2y ago
  The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't. After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites. [1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel. [2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content. Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda. [1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandkate.com/2011/spicy-molasses-cookies https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk... [2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandkate.com/2016/roasted-butternut-squash-risotto/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    That's pretty depressing. I don't really do any kind of content marketing work these days and haven't really been around that industry for a decade, but I can only imagine how disappointing it must have been to start seeing your traffic drop off, seeing which results were winning in search compared to your own site, seeing how they were winning, and then having to add more and more shit to your own site in order to climb back up the rankings.
- Lazare 2y ago
  That's not entirely fair. The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
  - jopsen 2y ago
    Nobody forces you to put ads on anything. The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad. Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it? Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
      Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden. Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind. And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
        cole-k 2y ago
        While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free. I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
- rats 2y ago
  [dead]
  - the_other 2y ago
    I suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
    - stareatgoats 2y ago
      FWIW, I tried a few recipes too and they came out just fine, without the usual clutter. I further anticipate that this is the direction we'll be going in general, "search" as we know it was a ~30 year period where Google reigned supreme. The world since moved on.
      - barbariangrunge 2y ago
        Yeah, but the new gatekeepers and tech are going to be worse. Ai companies, where you never see original human content any more. Just what the company’s ai shows you
  - alextingle 2y ago
    lol. "Cups"... No serious recipes there.
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam". This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours? Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    You should try viewing the site without your ad blocker turned on. Here's a preview: https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i. The red arrow is where ad #4 was when I checked it out last night. Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.
barbariangrunge 2y ago
I laughed out loud at this. You haven’t looked up many recipes in the last few years, have you? 95% of recipe results are nonsense and ads. It can take a few minutes of searching just to identify ingredients sometimes. My wife and I have been improvising recipes lately to avoid digging through all the junk. I actually recommend this: you can sort of make stuff up based on prior experience and things turn out pretty well sometimes. Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe

tonyarkles 2y ago

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".

fancy_pantser 2y ago
I got so fed up with this that I made a browser extension for it. It's in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox as well, but you'll have to build the xcode project in the Safari directory if that's your preferred browser. https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
mitemte 2y ago
I generally use https://www.taste.com.au https://www.taste.com.au. No bullshit prologue about how a distant relative used to make the recipe in question. Just and overview, photo ingredients and steps. Everything else is secondary and usually worthless.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Hmmm. First one I clicked from their home page: https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5xqtd https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x... > When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ... Just No.
  - olddustytrail 2y ago
    That's not a recipe, it's a short intro to a list of recipes. Just Learn To Read.
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      "Just Learn To Read" adds nothing to the sentence that precedes it. The point was already made correctly and well. You should avoid when possible starting a comment you want to actually be read with an insult or ending it with a snap. It degrades the quality of the conversation.
      - olddustytrail 2y ago
        I really don't care.
    - justinclift 2y ago
      > it's a [...] intro to a list of recipes That's exactly the point. It doesn't need to be there, doesn't add any value whatsoever, etc. ;)
- beretguy 2y ago
  Why when i try to click that link it links me to tags.news.com.ua ? My dns filters are blocking it.
throwup238 2y ago
The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once all the SEO vampires figured it out, everyone started to pile on prologues to all their content, not just recipe sites. In my experience that was the beginning of the end. Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kqr 2y ago
  Yup. This is the Long Click metric. Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for? If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up? The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower. (This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.) I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!
  - plank 2y ago
    One idea, but people will probably hate me for it: If you return to e.g. the google search site (hence: when the long click metric would be triggered) have a dialog on top saying ‘result great / OK / bad-or-confusing’. Can probably be gamed (bot nets trying to destroy the reputation of others) but at least a long time would not automatically mean ‘great result’. (In the arms race to combat destruction, it could be so that a ‘bad-or-confusing’ click would not actually push a value down, just not make it go higher). Kind regards, Roel
devsda 2y ago
The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't. After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites. [1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel. [2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content. Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda. [1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandkate.com/2011/spicy-molasses-cookies https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk... [2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandkate.com/2016/roasted-butternut-squash-risotto/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  That's pretty depressing. I don't really do any kind of content marketing work these days and haven't really been around that industry for a decade, but I can only imagine how disappointing it must have been to start seeing your traffic drop off, seeing which results were winning in search compared to your own site, seeing how they were winning, and then having to add more and more shit to your own site in order to climb back up the rankings.
Lazare 2y ago
That's not entirely fair. The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
- jopsen 2y ago
  Nobody forces you to put ads on anything. The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad. Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it? Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
    Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden. Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind. And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
      - cole-k 2y ago
        While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free. I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
rats 2y ago
[dead]
- the_other 2y ago
  I suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
  - stareatgoats 2y ago
    FWIW, I tried a few recipes too and they came out just fine, without the usual clutter. I further anticipate that this is the direction we'll be going in general, "search" as we know it was a ~30 year period where Google reigned supreme. The world since moved on.
    - barbariangrunge 2y ago
      Yeah, but the new gatekeepers and tech are going to be worse. Ai companies, where you never see original human content any more. Just what the company’s ai shows you
- alextingle 2y ago
  lol. "Cups"... No serious recipes there.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam". This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours? Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  You should try viewing the site without your ad blocker turned on. Here's a preview: https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i. The red arrow is where ad #4 was when I checked it out last night. Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.

barbariangrunge 2y ago

I laughed out loud at this. You haven’t looked up many recipes in the last few years, have you? 95% of recipe results are nonsense and ads. It can take a few minutes of searching just to identify ingredients sometimes. My wife and I have been improvising recipes lately to avoid digging through all the junk. I actually recommend this: you can sort of make stuff up based on prior experience and things turn out pretty well sometimes. Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe