But how will I read about "Dakota", an avid yoga enthusiast who just happens to be a mom, who enjoys making healthy and savory meals for her family while blogging?
Seriously, I hope this spells an end to the Google ranking imposed nonsense that makes the simple act of searching for a recipe so insufferable.
It's definitely grown worse now, but I think that this originated from recipe sites that people actually used to follow, because the blogs were interesting and we got to know the writers, and what's changed is more that we're jumping to the first Google hit and we expect them just to grant us the information we wanted.
There is a difference between opening up a recipe site, like a favorite blog, or the New York Times (which does the same kind of spiel before its recipes), just to read and find out what interesting thing they have posted, vs doing a search for "pasta carbonara," clicking on the first link, and having to read a life-story.
I never mind opening up the recipe section of the New York Times and reading about what's so interesting about this recipe, and memorable times it was served. That's because I trust the article to be vaguely interesting, and reading it is a form of entertainment. There's a reason why no newspaper's recipe section has ever simply been: "Pasta Carbonara: 1 lb pasta. 2 oz Pancetta. 5 egg yolks. Cheese. Combine as directed below."
So I feel like the in-vogue hatred of these recipe site styles is more a reflection of how expectations on consuming and searching for recipes has changed, more than significant changes in how recipes have always worked.
I think it's also about different types of recipe collections.
There are cookbooks that are all recipes. This seems to be what the HN crowd is looking for when they search the internet.
There are cookbooks where each recipe is accompanied by a little story. These seem to sell well, judging by the number of them that appear on bookstore shelves.
And then there are cookbooks where all of the anecdotes are in the front of the book and the recipes are in the back. These are the ones I like because I can easily find what I'm looking for, but can still read the background about a recipe, if I choose. It's not right in front of me causing the actual recipe steps to continue on another page.
I think recipes and the internet don't mix, unless you're just looking up ingredients while shopping. It's one of the areas where a fat, old cookbook is always better, in my experience.
30 years from now, nobody is going to cherish grandma's dog-eared and tattered old iPad full of recipes.
>And then there are cookbooks where all of the anecdotes are in the front of the book and the recipes are in the back. These are the ones I like because I can easily find what I'm looking for, but can still read the background about a recipe, if I choose.
I inherited a series of Time Life cookbooks from my grandmother. They must have been printed in the 70s. Each of them essentially comes in two parts. A full size book with lots of pictures, introductions and visual guides and a small ring-bound booklet that's essentially all recipes.
What I also find interesting about them is that many recipes are rather laborious and from scratch since they were written before having all that many kitchen appliances and pre-made ingredients.
There's also cookbooks that are almost more like a textbook, with technical cooking information followed by recipes (almost like textbook information followed by exercises).
There also might be an issue that recipes themselves can not be copyrighted. Article content and writing alongside the recipe can be copyrighted, but the recipe itself is not eligible for copyright protection at all. So if you're trying to make money off of a site, if it only had recipes, there is no protection whatsoever from someone setting up an identical copy and monetizing it themselves.
Many of the recipe sites are following a cargo cult-like methodology to SEO and only have stories before their recipes because of how they perceive Google's ranking algorithm will rank their content.
It's gone to extremes now, but to be honest - if someone wants to blog and post a recipe at the same time, that's their prerogative?
Some people actually enjoy reading those things too. There's a place for straight recipe sites, and a place for personal word-vomit blogs with a recipe at the bottom.
The web would be a sad place if you were only allowed to write your recipes in LaTeX.
Yes, they can do whatever they desire. The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google.
On the user side if you only want straightforward recipes, you're out of luck, because they're never going to be near the top of the search results.
If you are one of the people looking to read these recipe background stories, even you get a mediocre experience, because the majority of the content you're reading was written primarily for Google (how many times can I reference salmon, fish, atlantic, norwegian, protein, healthy, omega-3 and smoked in this recipe story to hit all of the important keywords?).
>The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google.
Citation needed. When I do a search on, say, Wiener Schnitzel (which I made last night) it looks to me as if the top searches are pretty to the point. Honestly, I tend to want some context for a recipe other than just a list of ingredients and some directions.
Same for me too - especially in the Google recipe snippets at the top of the search. I find those tend to have more straight recipes, whereas the normal search list has more of the story style.
And for context, I do like reading about the history of a recipe, why it was created etc... not all the stories float my boat, but literally all it takes is a scroll.
If a recipe is too hard to find, just move on. If there's a few paragraphs of things you don't care about before the recipe, press page down. Maybe let Dakota write what she wants on her own site.
One reason I haven't seen mentioned here for that personal content: it's also a question of building context and trust. If I go to Bon Appetit for a recipe, I know they've tested it a few times and it should be more or less OK even if I don't recognize the author. If I go to a barebones anonymous just-the-recipes site, I have no faith that it ever worked and if it did, it wasn't just a fluke and it was written down right.
Having some detail around a recipe from a previously unknown source allows me to build a connection to a persona in my head, genuine or otherwise. If a recipe doesn't work I'll know to avoid the site in the future. If it does work I can remember that connection and come back to the site again with some more confidence.
Dakota also owns many beautiful bowls and whisks handmade from sustainable materials, featured in 20 photos before the recipe hidden behind another link
I hate blogger recipes, luckily there are enough cooking sites that are well curated.
My understanding was that it happened more organically.
When I see a story at the top of a page, what I feel like I'm really seeing, most of the time, is an attempt by a nano-influencer, or really just an average person, to build a brand.
You could read 100 recipes from a person that included no details about themselves, then see their name on a blog and not even realize it was them.
But if the story is from the Pioneer Woman, and now you know a bit about her family, you might be more receptive to buying her cookbook, or signing up for her subscription newsletter, or watching her TV show.
Or, more realistically, in the other direction: you could sell Netflix on a show about you based on the number of recipes people view each month, that have your life story embedded in them.
So, over time, you end up with the current situation, as infinitely many people attempt to climb the ranks.
I don't have any direct proof that recipe sites are doing this. I only look at just how many "stories" there are, and how many recipes. There just looks like too much writing. And it too is also very formulaic.
And it's also 'if I was to do a recipe site, I'd use a text generator'
Sounds cheaper than paying a freelancer $0.025 per word, too.
I suppose if you were just starting a blogspam recipe site, you could initially pay freelancers for the first articles, and use them as your training corpus. But since this sort of templated recipe site is already evil, just scrape all the other recipe sites and use their articles as your corpus.
"When we vacationed in { madlib( international_city ) }, we ate a { r.Name }, and it was delicious. When we returned home, we tried to recreate the recipe, but it was never quite right. After months of trying, it's finally perfect."
"As a child, I remember my grandmother making { r.Name } and eating it with all my cousins. It was her secret recipe. She never told anyone. When she died, we were all very sad because we thought the recipe was gone forever. But I found this in her old { madlib( noun ) }, and now I'm the most popular cousin at the reunion."
The "9/11 content" is also literally four sentences long. One sentence also introduces the recipe contributor, while another describes the original source she adapted it from.
It's not particularly gratuitous, especially given the date and location.
Now we need an bot that parses the comments and applies AI to do . . . something with the people who say the substituted half the ingredients for what they had and left the others out to reply and tell them what recipe they actually made and that they can stuff their 1 star review.
When I search for recipes, I type in the food I want + recipe and then open the top 5 or so links. I quick scan for a list of ingredients. If I don't easily spot on in a few seconds I move on. I'll do this until I have a couple different lists of ingredients for making the item. This ends up taking less than a minute or two. That just isn't a significant portion of time compared to how long I'll spend comparing different recipes to find a common theme to follow.
Maybe it is because I never follow a single recipe but instead combine the common themes from a couple that the whole life story before the recipe shtick isn't something that bothers me.
For you to open 5 websites, dismiss the cookie permission request on each one, dismiss the notifications request, scroll down to find the ingredients list, dismiss the scrolling activated newsletter signup, read the ingredients list, and click the 'next page' button to see the instructions to work out what you can tweak, all in an average of 24s per site is very impressive.
I just tried it. Went to the top seven sites for chicken tikka masala. Exited one for not loading, had to mute another tab with an annoying video, but got to the recipe in 6 of them in under two minutes. No popups (though I do have an ad blocker that may have prevented them).
>read the ingredients list, and click the 'next page' button to see the instructions to work out what you can tweak
That wasn't included. I was talking about scanning to verify there was an ingredient list. I pointed that out when I said:
>That just isn't a significant portion of time compared to how long I'll spend comparing different recipes to find a common theme to follow.
You dismiss the challenges of finding a single recipe by mentioning you find several and combine them? That completely defeats the purpose of a recipe. You're literally creating your own recipe at that stage.
Finding several to combine should be harder than finding any single one of those represented among the several.
As far as the purpose of a recipe, it still informs me of the ingredients and amounts so I can make a reasonable approximation. Say I want to cook chili, something that there seems to be innumerable recipes for. And say I want to add beans to mine, though my personal recipe doesn't normally include beans. So how many beans should I add? And what kind of beans should I add? Well if I check the top 5 recipes for chili with beans and see that 4 of them use kidney beans and that they tend to use 1 cup per pound of meat average, I can now modify my own recipe in a more informed fashion. This also works for cooking something when I don't know where to begin.
It's a running joke in our house. I start off wanting to make some mashed potatoes, and time and time again, I have to suffer through someone's life story--the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream--etc. Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.
“Why doesn’t everyone who is putting information out there for free not cater to exactly my needs”.
What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it.
And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.
It's a sweet world view, but the truth is that the majority of these cooking sites are filling in content for SEO and ad purposes, and the "stories" are fictions written by Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
Or Doreen, a 54 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is trying to make ends meet at something under 3¢/word.
I haven't actually written for the site in question. I'm not trying to imply that I have. More like saying "Yeah, this is absolutely a thing."
And it's a thing in part because my actual original blogging that's the real deal doesn't get enough tips and Patreon supporters. If people want to see less content marketing to get ad revenue and more quality writing aimed at providing something fresh, they should be looking for independent authors to support whose writing they actually like.
I was providing original content written entirely by me for years before I began doing freelance writing. I would have likely never become a freelance writer if people had been willing to leave tips, promote my writing, engage with me so I would have a better idea of what to provide for my audience and so forth.
If you don't like what's on the internet, go "look in the mirror" so to speak. I've been on Hacker News nearly 11 years and was literally homeless for nearly six of that while people around here told me "Go get a real job. Writing doesn't pay. Your expectation that your writing should be capable of providing a living wage is just silly talk."
It's not so-called market forces at work. It's human choice and those choices are rooted in what we value and all this. If this world isn't the world folks want to see, they can make other choices more in line with what they claim they want instead of "being traffic" while complaining about it.
(Edit: For the record: Most of my freelance writing is content for small business sites and I don't feel the tiniest bit of regret. I like working for a paid service and I blog about that too and get accused of the site being content marketing when it absolutely isn't. http://writepay.blogspot.com/)
They're being rightly trashed because it's a SEO tactic and nothing more. Between the preamble ranking them higher and Adsense requiring "substance" in order to monetise the page, there is a systematic issue that's leading to what is essentially useless information to what I would say is the majority of people.
They're very welcome to write their life story, but I bet if google changed their algorithm slightly you'd see it disappear - and I'd say that would be a good thing.
HNers writhing over each other to be the most cynical and dismissive.
For fun, can you link me to a highly ranked recipe page with a bullshit SEO story on it in line with "the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream"?
But just to prove your point and make you happy, and also because I'm hungry, I googled "sushi recipe idea" and clicked the first link that, without fail, talks about the very special valentine's day Tom^Wthe author and her husband spent years ago and how sushi is now a tradition.
You have to scroll halfway down to get your ingredients list after learning that her husband is a vegetarian, getting a history of the author cooking mostly plants before anyway, getting a lesson on what egg noodles are and, finally, the ingredients.
"When I woke up that Sunday morning, it was a crisp 68°. I opened every window in the house (the first time we’d aired it out since April) and put on a pair of jeans and a light long-sleeved shirt. While Scott was busy appraising his fantasy football rosters, I was searing beef and taking pictures."
> What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it.
They're mostly copying recipes from other places then applying SEO. That's it. The ridiculous probably-made-up stories are for SEO.
It's not about trashing someone for doing something they love. It's about a prescribed format for food blogs that has all but taken over anything food related on the internet. I highly doubt it's a coincidence that thousands of food bloggers adapted a "five pages about me and then the recipe" template for their writing. As others are saying, it's an SEO tactic, and it's probably annoying to the bloggers too.
There's no arguing about it making recipes more "readable" when you have to scan down page after page to get to the actual ingredient list. That's super annoying. To put it into perspective, if the recipe was at the top, and the blogger wanted to spend five chapters talking about their life afterwards, more power to them, I wouldn't care a bit.
Or maybe, people are just fed up with the 'fluff'. I know I am. I don't need or want a 10 minute lead in to a news story that finally explains the issue. I don't have time to sift through drivel to get the information I am after. This isn't academic research project. And frankly, I don't give two shits about ANY of the blog spam fluff. When I'm looking for a recipe, I want the technicals of 'how to make this', and that's it.
I see this as more a problem of the web, than the recipe sites themselves. More and more often, web sites are shoving information down your eyeballs to keep you on the page longer. I hate this trend. I want the service or information to give me what I want, and get out of my way. Google search? Get me what I want, and get out of the way. Email inbox? Same deal. Yet the exact opposite is happening with more and more invasive time wasting drivel, being injected everywhere.
Having thought about this and my own use of cookbooks as loose inspiration rather than actually to follow in detail, I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. In particular, the fluff has value even if you never cook the recipe! Which saves a lot of time and inconvenience on your part while still giving the same warm fluffy feelings.
Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated.
The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot.
(I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)
I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want.
I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site.
Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
I've also read that it's to do with copyright - the recipes themselves can't be copyrighted, but the text around them can. Scraper republishes your ingredients list: not a lot you can do. Scraper republishes your fluffy anecdote and pictures: BLAMMO!
Except the whole reason this article on scraping recipe sites was written was to ignore the fluff. Forcing copyright this way doesn't sound particularly helpful when the fluffy anecdote has so little value in comparison to the recipe. Or is it really the case that the average reader wants the anecode secondary to the recipe?
It feels like people are trying to make money around information that is fundamentally impractical to make money off of, so they're forced into doing whatever it takes to make money off of it anyway. "Whatever it takes" is defined by Google yet ruins the user experience, and so that is why recipe sites are this way.
I mostly like the pre-recipe text on Smitten Kitchen.
Sometimes it's a little rambling, but there's often useful information about the recipe that follows, like shortcuts that seem like they should work, but don't. She includes some interesting links or background, and getting a bite-sized glimpse of someone else's life isn't the worst thing.
I can't validate this but have been told this by multiple authors and SEO professionals. So it's anecdotal. One blogger apologized to me and told me she was embarrassed doing it but it's an industry practice. She explained it's because other recipe sites use automated scraping tools and republish their recipes in an effort to outrank original authors. The personal fluff helps slow them down. Also, a lot of recipes are bullshit, they manually steal them from elsewhere and change a few variables to evade copyright claims. Although, I guess changing a few variables is how cuisines evolve.
Photographs, videos, or drawings of recipes in progress are copyrightable, and usually more helpful. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the recipe is actually viable.
That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
Thanks. This makes sense. I was wondering what these fluff pieces have to do with SEO, because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results.
Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results.
Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
Yes, search engines monitor result clicks, bounce rates, dwell times, etc. They do affect ranking. And if you have Google analytics on your recipe site, Google has even more data about it.
I think they specifically mentioned it does not affect it, someone asked that question in a webinar. If it would affect it, than it could be abused (eg. just send 10k bots that spend 1 hour on the site), plus a longer session doesn't necessarily mean a better site or better user experience. Google itself is a good example, where the point of Google is to spend as little time as possible on their page, as it's just a step between the user and his destination.
I have done lot of work on cocktails (major brand) and they key is the structured mark-up we are trying some tests on longer form listings ie >200 words.
I think that food is much more dispersed apart from super stars like Nigella, Jamie and the BBC so its harder for the average food blogger.
Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader.
Also don't discount the
Some of the best stories too have bits of the art inside of the food science anecdotes that contribute to a sense of why a particular variation on a recipe worked better for the author. Some authors have more of a sweet tooth, and others live in higher altitudes or tweak their recipes for camp stoves on hiking trips up the mountains. Some authors spend days and weeks of failures trying to get a proper balance of flour to baking soda/baking powder for just the exact sort of yeast rise they want from their dough, and others just wing it let the dough live or crumble as nature intends as it adds a little chaos to the whimsy and art of their eventual plating.
It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time.
Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.
I read long ago that you can/should always trust recipes printed on manufacturer's packages; after all, they've chosen them to stake their ingredients' reputations on.
> Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.)
No. The butter gets lost in the potatoes and mouthfeel of the fat is compromised. That is the reason that so much is needed if you do it this way. Much better to only add it right when serving, leaving the butter and potatoes largely unmixed. Preferably added in an amount “to-taste” by the individual. I believe this was covered by McGee’s “On Food and Cooking”, but I may be misremembering.
I would buy a cooking book with recipes explained like this one. With real world tricks and explaining "why" you do it in that way. A raw list of ingredients is, in my opinion, almost useless.
America’s Test Kitchen (TV) / Cooks Illustrated (books) will scratch your itch.
My foodie friend and I use a lot of their recipes.
The cool thing is that sometimes you will disagree with their preferences (totally normal), so you can use one of their variants that has the attributes that you want. Or similarly, you can see how changing certain ingredients changes the outcome and personalize your version of the recipe accordingly. It definitely saves some experimental batches.
I’ve found that The New Best Recipe cookbook covers this pretty well for me. They have an introduction to each recipe talking about all the variants they tried, and then there’s a clearly marked recipe section.
Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.")
"Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."
Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.
There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.
> Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally
just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something
people would gravitate towards
In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a
big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have
something like that in English?
I usually add "BBC" to my search term, which ① gets a straightforward page and ② ensures the measurements and oven temperatures will be metric.
The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
I mean in Google search, or any other general web search.
It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.
Seriously, I hope this spells an end to the Google ranking imposed nonsense that makes the simple act of searching for a recipe so insufferable.