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Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
191–200 of 360 posts
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#192What 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…
Google weights time spent on site in rankings. If you bounce instantly back to the search results, obviously you didn’t find what you were looking for. If you stay for a while, maybe you did.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have literally never met anyone express (2). Any time anyone needs a recipe site they immediately start complaining about it, unprompted.
Smitten Kitchen often has a few paragraphs before the recipe. I don't always read it, but I also don't hate it. It helps she writes well and it seems to genuinely reflect the author's life--I think it started out as a personal blog with occasional recipes before becoming a recipe site with bloggy bits bolted on. The text is also fairly helpful, in that it sometimes describes less successful attempts cooking the same…
Smitten Kitchen was one of the OG food blogs that established the pattern that recipe spam websites are trying to emulate. Back in the aughts, searching for a recipe on Google was useful because they would prioritize "enriched" sites like Smitten Kitchen, David Lebovitz's blog, Orangette, The Wednesday Chef, etc., where the narrative portion of the recipe primarily established who the recipe would appeal to, tips on unusual techniques employed in the recipe, and sometimes a humanizing anecdote or two.
The format of Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz's blog have remained unchanged for about 15 years, probably because those authors used the success of their blogs to establish related revenue streams (mostly via bestselling cookbooks). I would be surprised if the blogs themselves still make much money, given how few display ads are included on each page.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The lasagne recipe page would be one I count as bad. There's a lot of useless text before the recipe. The other two result pages are good. Interesting enough, the big name recipe sites: Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc. all are short and to the point. But for some reason the crappy recipe sites outperform them on Google.
NYT recipes are almost always in the top 3 results for me, I don’t think they are being outperformed that much if at all.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#195I've all but stopped getting recipes from websites. It always feels like every recipe I find was either just copied from some other site with one ingredient changed, or there's some brand sponsored ingredient shoehorned in. A lot of modern recipe books aren't much better, but there's maybe a little more useful info.
The main thing I've done to find decent recipes these days is to check youtube. Not stuff like 5 minute crafts or overproduced tiktok recipe "hacks", but videos by people cooking in their own kitchen, mostly in real time, talking about what they're doing and why. You can see the whole process and see their technique and be reasonably certain that they know what they're doing on some level.
Here's a few people I always come back to in case anyone is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNrkDzpgSFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dSeHP14Osc
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#196In the same vein, I made the Recipe Filter extension for browsers: Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter... Source code (there's Safari in there if you don't mind building it yourself): https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter I was spurred into action by a comment here on HN back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.co…
Thanks for creating this! I use this plugin all the time.
I often don't remember it's running, but then I invariably land on a recipe site, and then the Recipe Filter modal pops up, and instantly brings a smile to my face.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#197According to https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... : Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients. So besides SEO, there's this thing where the recip…
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Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lasagne recipe page would be one I count as bad. There's a lot of useless text before the recipe. The other two result pages are good. Interesting enough, the big name recipe sites: Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc. all are short and to the point. But for some reason the crappy recipe sites outperform them on Google.
The Lasagna recipe is an independent cooking blogger (note the "Hi there, I'm Holly!" in the top-right corner). Food Network, Allrecipes, Tegel, and other sites mentioned are not promoting a specific person, but an entire brand. Babish is the exception to this rule, but he "changed the game" by going for YouTube instead of blogs. Although the optimization is infuriating, in my search to become a decent cook, I have f…
> Babish is the exception to this rule, but he "changed the game" by going for YouTube instead of blogs.
I think this (or a hybrid approach) was already a thing. See Food Wishes (Chef John), which has been using a similar model for a while.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright law. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at least databases - even if they solely consist of trivial, non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was put into place after a company in Germany just hired people to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages, and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least…
That’s not copyright but a separate database right with different rules.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#200> 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? I lived with a food blogger for six years and might be able to provide some more perspective for these types of comments (beyond just SEO). First, there's actuall…
I have yet to meet or read about a single person who has ever said "I really enjoy scrolling through twenty paragraphs of backstory and embedded auto-play videos and advertisements while I browse for recipes."
So while I'm sure there exist bloggers who put care into these things, a tiny minority of people seem to find any value there. In fact it now seems that so many people are aggravated by this style that an app to remove them all has been developed.