Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#141

Post by pessimizer » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #104

Hard_Space wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the WP article: But it’s even more complex than that. The stories are personal. They’re cultural. They’re often told from the perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the creators that their stories have no value. It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women fo…

I’ve got to be honest: those stories hold no value to me. That’s the truth. I don’t know why the WaPo wants those us who are like me to pretend otherwise.

It's weird how you go from "to me" to "wants us." Surely you can imagine that people might be interested in history and stories around food.

I personally don't give a shit about mathematicians and scientists personal lives, but I don't have a problem imagining those who do. I think the numbers say it all. Others think that the examination of every detail of the person who wrote the numbers first might give them some insight into how to create more numbers.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#142

Post by leifg » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

I use a similar recipe manager on my phone (paprika 3 but also playing around with Mela). They come with an integrated browser to download the recipes.

Not only do they did rid of the novel about the ingredients and their origins, they also get around most paywalls.

The thing that would make me instantly switch to any other manager is an app that would parse recipes from the various YouTube and TikTok videos. If you follow the right accounts these videos are a gold mine.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#143

Post by hericium » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

short12 wrote: post #120

Recipe websites are a prime example of everything that is wrong with the web today. The bulk collection websites are primarily crap but for the same reasons as the personal branded websites. A shit ton of junk around a sometimes worthwhile background story or such and then the recipe all with shit tons of junk interrupting and destroying any sense of continuity. Fuck their stupid ads

Web written for Googlebot, not humans.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#144

Post by micromacrofoot » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

shoulderfake wrote: post #68

csa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below? From an SEO perspective, yes. Time spent on page will be less if the recipe is on the top.

Such bs. I rarely spend more than 20s on a recipe page anyways. I scroll quickly to find ingredients box and thats it. Done...

At this level of optimization even the 0.25s spent scrolling past a story is enough to make a difference... this is like "competitive swimmers shaving off their body hair" level SEO.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#145

Post by dwighttk » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #82

floatrock wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the rich media carousel previews, etc. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... If you want to know what categories of things will have especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results, look at the other…

I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to test: "pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent: https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ "lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good: https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ "sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads y…

> Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads you see

Be careful. I also have an ad blocker and sent a fun link to my mom a friend had sent me and she saw Alllllllllll the ads. It was not a fun link for her. Didn’t even think of it before sending.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#146

Post by ethbr0 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

2bitencryption wrote: post #11

What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - any…

> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe?

As a child growing up outside of Atlanta, this is how we were typically taught recipes.

"One day, when you're sharing this recipe on a mass communication network that doesn't exist today, make sure to (1) mention that you're from Atlanta & (2) include a story about your children / partner / family."

I guess, maybe it's different elsewhere?

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#147

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #100

The comments on recipe sites are often useful. Things like: pre-heat your mason jars before pouring in the caramelized sugar or they'll crack. You can find clarifications, or things people have substituted, or just how a recipe has failed for some folks. There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a few favorite cooking books: On Food and…

Recipes I like go into a Google Drive shared folder for me, where I standardize format, add notes/tweaks, and share with friends/family who want 'em.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#148

Post by MadeThisToReply » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #43

password1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's SEO. Once a SEO expert was showing me user heatmaps on his popular website's articles. The users completely ignored 90% of the content and of the text of a page. I asked him why so many parts of the text were ignored by the users and his answer was "oh, that text is not for the users, it's for google". The literally paid writers to write articles way longer than needed solely to satisfy Google algorithms. The wo…

> The worst part is that it worked and they earned a lot of money from it. This is the crux of the answer. The reason why recipe sites are full of garbage? Because it is effective and profitable.

This is also the reason why most food is full of garbage.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#149

Post by 3guk » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

It's such a shame that something like this has to exist and that the creators have to resort to a fairly fixed playbook of SEO techniques (like whole life story, recipe development etc etc).

From my personal experience running a small tech tips site - it seems that I constantly end up further down the rankings cause I refuse to stuff each page with information that is not relevant.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#150

Post by floren » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

shortformblog wrote: post #138

AwkwardPanda wrote: post #2

It can get frustrating skimming through text walls just to find the recipe on blogs/sites. Authors do it to get high ranking on Google. You can use OnlyRecipe.app to extract the recipe information. It works on almost all sites/blogs which follow a recipe standard when they post. You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila. Android: https://play.goog…

FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies. https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...

They're full of shit, though. Crack open the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and find a cookie recipe, then search for the same recipe name online. You're going to find 1000 word essays about Dear Meema's Secret Snickerdoodle recipe... followed by the same damn recipe as the BH&G cookbook.