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Scraping Recipe Websites

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Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#71

Post by WorldMaker »

pjc50 wrote: post #12
tmountain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#72

Post by wolco »

tmountain wrote: post #6
kmbfjr wrote: post #5

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 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.

I have one. It doesn't rank after 15 years.

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#74

Post by karatestomp »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #40
tmountain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

> 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.

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#75

Post by snuxoll »

taude wrote: post #52
selecsosi wrote: post #32

I highly useful tool in my household for dealing with the SEO/tracking scourge that recipe blogs have become is https://www.paprikaapp.com/ . Hoping someday to have some spare time to integrate this with https://grocy.info/ and have a pipeline for recipe -> preparation automation.

Big fan of this app, and I love it so I don't have to keep revisiting the sites. This is one of the few apps, I've purchased multiple times: for my iOS eco-system (I typically cook with my iPad), my android phone (so I can add recipes on the go), and my partner's devices so she can add recipes to our list. We've developed a little workflow where we put all the recipes we want to try into an "incoming" category, and t…

It also has a timer built in that, unlike the default iOS Clock app, allows multiple timers to be run simultaneously. Just tap on any time in the recipe to start it as well.

Paprika is well worth the couple bucks.

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#77

Post by SamBam »

kmbfjr wrote: post #5

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.

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#78

Post by Freak_NL »

onion2k wrote: post #56
SkyBelow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it pose an actual problem? 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…

This ends up taking less than a minute or two. 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 impressi…

Or just get thrown out completely because you are from the EU.

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#79

Post by crankylinuxuser »

tylerrobinson wrote: post #49
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of why there's a life story copy at the top of recipes is that a recipe is not copyrightable, but a story is. And, an AI can generate a story one time relatively easy. https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...

Is there evidence that the "annoying recipe sites" in question include algorithmic stories, or are you speaking hypothetically?

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'

Re: Scraping Recipe Websites

#80

Post by karatestomp »

jedieaston wrote: post #13

Paprika 3 (I use the iOS version, but I believe the Mac version has the same function) has a fantastic web scraper for recipes. I've had to correct maybe 1-2 errors across 100 recipes I've brought in from a bunch of different sites. It's super helpful to look through them in a standardized way (and you can sort by ingredient/category) to figure out what to make.

I think most recipes are published using a microformat that makes this pretty easy, and that's why Paprika (I use it too!) so rarely screws up.
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