We're bombarding ourselves with walls of human-unreadable English that we're supposed to ignore. It's like something from a stupid old sci-fi story.
We're bombarding ourselves with walls of human-unreadable English that we're supposed to ignore. It's like something from a stupid old sci-fi story.
Exactly why I stick to cookbooks in the past year or so. More and more, "fuck the internet", long live murdering trees.
The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time.
As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.
The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate.
(Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) )
Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant".
I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...).
Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...
Honestly, I miss absolutely nothing from the internet when it comes to cooking. But I also wanted to be a chef. So I studied how to properly cook long ago and I cook almost every day... so I'll admit in already an outlier. Still, the way the internet treats cooking is retarded. It doesn't surprise me that people don't like to cook if they grew up with the internet as a learning resource. All these people overcomplicate easy recipes and substitute anything because it makes them feel like pretty snowflakes.
Does that still work? Most people's grandmas today where very much alive and cooking in both the 70s, 80s and even 90s and thus as steeped as anybody in all the international influences and 'foreign' ingredients that those decades brought.
the way the internet treats cooking is retarded.
And here you and I disagree. I like the way that 'modern' cooking is willing to revisit well established and 'sacred' truths about food and put them to the test. Perhaps a housewife in the 1920s isn't the authoritative source on the best way to prepare a dish, and even if she is there is no way to know without someone actually testing that hypothesis. Sites like Serious Eats and all the sites they begat bring both rigor and the joy of experimentation back into cooking. I mean why not substitute one thing for another just to see what happens or apply the 'wrong' technique to a standard dish? Many a dish that is considered a 'classic' today no doubt got their start that way.
Yeah I love those. The "random grandma with a gopro" tutorials always work, modulo language barrier. The video editing is crap and you sometimes have to keep fast forwarding while stuff is cooking but the recipes are good.
I have been to what I thought was deep in the Internet recipe mines and never saw this.
It's good to slow down and enjoy those fairly simple things.
This is way older than a decade. I knew people getting into it and sharing recipes on Usenet. The current boom is new, but online low carb communities are ancient in internet terms.
It wasn't very palatable back then, but people sure did try.
There was already an active Usenet community for lowcarb diets in the late 1990s (alt.support.diet.low-carb).
Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.
In my experience, these sites tend to be less spammy too, but there's certainly variation there too.
There seems to be two distinct 'genres' of cookbooks. One written by people who have studied cooking, and one written by people that have studied marketing.
Although, I will admit, my youngest daughter and I get a kick out of the stories. We even try to predict which theme the writer will go with. Some are like Christmas Hallmark movies. lol.
I switched over to duck duck go several months ago. it's just as good as google for almost everything.
> 17 U.S.C. 102(b): In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
So it's been a tradition in the recipe space for decades to include lots of descriptive "filler" text when you're writing your recipe book/blog. That filler text is copyrightable, which gives you legal recourse against people who might try to wholesale copy your work.
Of course, in the modern world, it's definitely true that they can also help with SEO. And honestly I wouldn't completely discount the idea of people actually reading them -- I know my wife has gone through phases where she has a couple different blogs bookmarked and will read through them to get ideas, but also because she liked the writing of the author.
Maybe they're right and some people do love the stories, but they're definitely not just there for SEO anymore. At the very most cynical interpretation, scrolling through the story is the "cost" of the recipe - the blogger gets an ego boost thinking thousands of people want to read all about their life, and the readers get a recipe.
Look, I have the very sad allergy to hazelnuts... I love hazelnuts... but they don't love me. Also soy. Soy is borderline deadly to me even in small amounts. So, I can't have asian food without cooking it myself. Fish sauce sans soy fermentation is my substitute. I do get the allergy issue and being left out in many foods. But I find it so damn hard to believe that all these people are allergic to everything but these "healthy alternatives" that end up being nutritionally empty. Then they wonder why they're suddenly anemic. Then they don't get enough sun because their skin "suddenly" became sensitive. Then they have depression issues. Then they can't shit straight. Then they start cutting back on other foods. Then they have to live on horse pills.
Sorry, rant. Got angry.
Fun argument to have with the next anti-vaxxer you meet. If they argue about mercury or lead being in vaccines, agree with them. Just flat out agree with how terrible it is. Then ask if they like Himalayan sea salt. There's like a 99.9% chance they love it, along with essential oils. "You do know there are more trace amounts of mercury and lead in Himalayan sea salt than in vaccines?" You will then agree with me that mental gymnastics needs to be in the next Olympics. It's amazing how they'll talk around it. Make some popcorn, open a beer and watch the show.
The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining.
Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments).
The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this “real” content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness.
All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc.
One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it’s probably worth reading. If not, who knows.
(Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)
It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.
You have to crawl through piles of garbage like a racoon to find the one-liner you were looking for.
but they are not doing that anymore, it is really hard to find a not spammy (what you described) result on Google these days.
and other search engines are only copying the Google algorithm we need to get back to judging a web page by its content, AI should be able to help now or soon.
Nobody would start using Google Search in its current format.
Ads are Google's bread and butter, and has been for the entirety of its existence as a public company.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
I just Googled Peking duck to try something at random. Of the links on the front page, one was to wikipedia, one was to an article about Peking duck, and the rest where recipe sites (BBC Food, Allrecipes, Serious Eats etc.) or serious looking/sounding food blogs that had the recipe front and center. I don't know if it's a geographic thing (I'm in Europe) or if Google has learnt my preferences, but finding 5 reasonable sounding recipes for Peking duck with Google was trivial.
Edit: Played around some more and spotted an interesting pattern. If a look up typical US dishes, like Key lime pie or BBQ brisket, then I got results more like the ones you describe. But looking up more 'international' dishes like Peking duck or coq au vin then the results where almost all good quality recipes.
And here I just thought people were basically self-absorbed wankers.
My most recent impression:
"I first learned about this recipe from my dog's aunt who was a lenape indian during the pre-cambrian era and she something something memories of childhood blah blah dinosaur steaks yap yap tedious digression on gritty herbs fluff fluff and so I was talking to my local grocer who put me onto an organic vegan gluten free biomagnetic interspordidial hyperflorpic gmo-free meg-free bpa-free taste-free free-free that reminded me of the time that..."
JUST FUCKING TELL ME HOW TO COOK THE BEANS JANET
It takes a very unique kind of person to write those things. And those are the ones Google is giving all the voice, while taking it away from normal people.
On the other hand, if you Google "How to do X" you will often find a youtube video in the top results. But it will skip the intro and jump right to the important part.
Sure there is a lot of garbage out there (e.g. everyone uploading 10 minute videos to hit the YouTube optimzation algorithm) but it does seem like Google does try to cut through some of the SEO garbage to get you the useful info faster.
When people find out the metrics to getting more views, they become meaningless.
Because Google doesn't have a financial incentive to show you quick, quality answers to you questions.
Google makes more money from you flailing around and fruitlessly searching over and over than giving you the right answer the first time.
That will work right up until the time somebody comes along and build a search engine (or other app) that will just "give you the right answer the first time."
For all their size and power, there's really nothing - in principle - stopping somebody from coming along and doing to Google, what Google did to Altavista. Yes it would be hard to execute, which may be why it hasn't happened... yet.