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Comment by octocop | Hacker News Reader

This is sooo true, every time i look for a recipe online it's all i ever see.

Don't look for crafting-ish instructions... the number of outright false farmed content is astonishing.

"Here is this stock photo of something near, we're going to teach you how to make it!" {4 unrelated steps} {stock photo again} "Tada!"

And it's surprising how many sites that are half decent on its own, if you visit it without an ad blocker they still have Taboola ads about how person in {your location} got rich in the way they don't want you to know.

There's a Chrome extension to fix that: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.

Glad to hear this exists, but is there anything like it for Firefox?

Most Chrome extensions can now be run on Firefox without alterations.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...

I tried loading the source as a temporary add-on, it looks like this is not one of them.

Did you see that I linked to the Firefox version of this extension?

I cannot say this enough: buy a recipe book.

Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.

The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.

See there is a double edged sword here because outstanding recipes are thesis papers explaining the motivation, concepts, prior art and research, history, experiments, methodology, equipment, and then finally, optionally even, the reipce. They should be long and verbose. You should learn something by reading a recipe.

The problem of course is that search crawlers can't tell the difference between between the two and so long but empty content is treated the same.

Book recipes have a different problem that they need to fill 100 or so pages of content and most authors have maybe 3-5 good recipes. So you get a ton of filler as well

Recipes have become hilarious as they have transitioned into storytelling pieces for whoever is trying to promote their lifestyle blog.

This is because of a quirk of copyright; in the US at least, a recipe itself is not considered copyrightable if it is a mere listing of ingredients; however, they can be covered by copyright when they have "substantial literary expression – a description, explanation, or illustration, for example – that accompanies a recipe or formula…”.

If you want some recipes that don't have all that nonsense associated, I'd recommend the BBC's Food site[0].

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes

Which for some reason competes with another BBC website, https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/

I skip to print recipe straight away. The whole story is for SEO and I don't honestly think anyone ever reads it.

My wife recently sent me a recipe that had a link right at the top: "Jump to recipe". It was amazing :)

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