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Comment by run-types | Hacker News Reader

I've basically never been taken to a recipe without a rambling preamble from Google. While food blogs may serve two audiences, a long introduction seems to be a requirement to appear in the top Google search results.

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Personally, I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that Google killed the Recipe Databases. There did used to be a few startups that tried to be Recipe Aggregators with advertising based business models, that would show recipes and then link to source blogs and/or cookbooks, and in the brief period where they existed Google scraped them entirely and showed entire recipes on search results and ate their ad revenue out from under them.

That is a really bad thing by Google. Their core business is not recipes.

Their core business is making money from other people’s content, no matter what it is.

Their core business is advertising and they have always been in a direct conflict-of-interest by competing with content sites for ad revenue buys.

Such databases would get battered by demands to remove content these days, if not already back then. No one want a database listing their stuff for ad revenue like that because many wouldn't follow the links so see their adverts or be subject to their tracking.

A couple of browser add-ons specifically geared around trimming recipe pages down have been taken down due to similar complaints.

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