False information on the internet is hiding the truth about onions

I encounter this several times a week it seems (google, ddg, doesn't seem to matter). Usually when trying to find the actual source of something, like a scientific study, the top hits are all news sites, often whith articles which look like copies of each other. I'm assuming they're ranked by number of visits and popularity in general of the site, but it makes it really hard to drill down to the source of something. To the point I usually give up. I am going to try the '-news' thing mentioned by another commenter though, hope that helps. Or are there any other tips?

I used to write for an amateur online magazine with product reviews and analysis of a certain industry. It wasn't big, but the content was good - not just in my opinion, I was told that many times by various readers. In ~2005 we routinely were #1 to #5 in searches related to the products we're covered. Today I often can't find new articles from that website even when I use the exact title as the query. The website is minimalist, fast and has no ads. The articles are extensive and well-conceived. And yet they are buried several pages deep under piles of single-paragraph stub "reviews" on more popular resources.

I assume the same thing happened/happens to a lot, maybe most small-scale content creators these days. Clickbait rules and content doesn't matter nearly as much as the number of incoming links. You can no longer rely on search engines to get you traffic and need to constantly self-promote on other websites (e.g. social networks).

Take this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...

If I search for '"Never Split The Difference" review', I want to find, well, people's reviews. Note that the book has several ratings on Amazon - it is a popular book.

Yet I found only perhaps 1 "honest" review in the first 2 pages of Google's results. Everything else I find reads like a promotion for the book.

Looking at Fakespot, there is some evidence of light tampering with Amazon's reviews on the book.

The reason I Googled it? I've read a few chapters and am appalled at the book. It essentially is trying to boost its popularity by trashing what is taught in well respected negotiation programs at top universities. But while repeatedly trashing that education throughout the book, he continually advocates strategies that are also taught by the same programs he is trashing.

Given that he continually bashes the most famous book on the topic (Getting To Yes), I wanted to see if anyone has done an honest comparison between the two - pointing out the author's somewhat dishonest stance. And I can't find it in the early Google hits. I see it only in the 1 or 2 star reviews on Amazon.

The downside is in the assumption that every difference is correct, but it's as dangerous as the assumption that only what is repeated is correct. Would be an interesting alternative at least.

Please buy ads." - Google

For Google it's a minus sign. (sometimes it's the word NOT)

E.g. "onions -news" (without the quotes) will search for the word onion and not return any sites that have the word news in them. This can have false positives so youd need to play around with the words.

False positives because non news sites may have the word news and news sites might not have that word.

Of course, I've never been mentioned in the news. Maybe the trick to being in a niche is keeping the niche quiet.

Being new in town is suspicious to google. Raising honestly to the top takes a lot of time and effort, unless you have incredible promotion habilities and/or deep SEO knowledge.

It's helped me find unique and interesting sites in the past.

It might be time to consider the need for a way to search all of this content that isn't bound to people trying to monetize the experience. DDG seems like an option in that regard.

I miss the old unhomogenized web.

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_strike.asp

Haha, just kidding. Just reminding you that there's nothing semantic about HTML :) The strikethrough is kind of deprecated, but there's no good semantic replacement, because the semantic web is actually a complete joke.

Source on my Wikipedia quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikethrough

  how long does it take to caramelize onions
  how long does it take to caramelise onions (note the typo)
  how long to caramelize an onion (not a typo but still wrong)
  how long to caramelize onions

http://i.imgur.com/XOT65j4.png

One of the things he showed us was how to properly chop and sweat onions to sweeten them, including how to use smell to tell when they were done. Somebody said "Oh, we're going to caramelize them." and the chef replied, quite matter of factly, "Oh, no, we'll be here all night if we caramelize them."

And that's when I learned there was a difference.

2) It relates to point 1, but the real solution would be that Google admits "I don't know/it depends" when the confidence is under some threshold.

FWIW you're fine, this wasn't a particularly long comment at all.

1) Choose a pan that has high heat retention. A cast iron skillet would work well for this purpose, although you may run into some concerns when it comes time to deglaze. Generally one deglazes with something like wine, but people recommend keeping highly acidic stuff away from cast iron out of fear of damaging its seasoning.

2) Throw the onions into the pot/pan. Add a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar to the onions. This will help them caramelize more quickly.

3) Turn the heat up to high and cover them for about two minutes. When you open the lid, you should notice a large amount of steam escaping. This is called "sweating" the onions. Onions need to be dry in order to brown properly--the sweating method helps them dry out more quickly.

4) Turning the heat down to medium-high, stir occasionally. You'll stir more frequently towards the end, pushing up from once every two minutes to once a minute, to once every thirty seconds, to constantly near the end. They're done when they're a deep mahogany brown.

That's it, really. As the original author said, there aren't any shortcuts to proper caramelized onions. The salt+sugar will help ever so slightly, the sweating will help ever so slightly. But you really shouldn't expect to caramelize them in less than a half hour.

EDIT: Down-votes for posting a recipe on HN? That's gotta be a new one on me.

- 1/4 cup olive oil - 6 onions, thinly sliced - Warm the oil over low heat in a large skillet or pot. Add a pinch of salt. - Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until onions are almost spreadably soft. About 3 hours.

No shortcuts, just take the time. Caramelized onions freeze and keep very well, so just stick them in some small tupperware in the freezer and defrost and use as needed. Much easier than trying to rush it 'on-demand' for a particular recipe.

https://books.google.com/books?id=nGcGCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA287&lpg=...

1. Add 1 tbsp each olive oil and butter to a pan and melt butter over medium heat. No special pans needed. A frying pan, a stock pot, a wok...I've had success in all of em.

2. Add medium-chopped onion to heated oil/butter. Gently stir for two minutes. Add a pinch of sugar and pinch of salt (aka 1 tsp each).

3. Turn heat down to low heat. Stir every few minutes for the first half hour, and then almost constantly for the next twenty to thirty minutes.

That's it.

Scocca: I throw them in the Crock-Pot overnight.

Ryssdal: Oh, that's so smart.

Scocca: They become a little juicy, and you might need to dry them out in the pan a bit before you actually use them, but it's a lot faster.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/member/views/thomas-keller...

http://www.foodorleans.com/miracle-5-hour-onions-caramelized...

Also, while the prep is the same, crockpot onions require literally no work during the cooking. On the stovetop, you do have to watch and stir them, which requires a little bit of attention. Since the crockpot version takes so long, the prep is also pretty far away from the rest of the cooking, which makes it "faster" if you have other stuff to do an hour before dinner.

Edit: If you haven't tried this, give it a go--it works well and you can put them on everything for a few days! Yum

I've made caramelized onions multiple times, watching over them for long periods of time. At some point several years ago I became confused by the issue referred to in the article, and thought that I was mistaken about what caramelizing onions was. I've come to realize that I was not.

However, caramelizing onions is a gradual process, and so I could see how what one calls "caramelized onions" could be seen as a matter of degree. With candy making, as a parallel, there are degrees of hardness; with roux there's different degrees of browning, etc. etc. etc.

You're probably right, because at some point early on something very very roughly resembling "caramelized onions" is achieved, which is basically the same as "fried onions." People assumed because the onions resembled what they were familiar with in fried onions, they must be the same, even though they're not.

> but he's not wrong

I think you either contradicted yourself there or it isn't clear from the way you've written it that you're talking about different things.