Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't really expect google searches to be a curator of good recipes

I don't expect Google (or any automated service) to be able to rank recipes from a culinary point of view. I absolutely expect Google to be able to detect someone's SEO life story bullshit at the top of a recipe and penalize that for ranking purposes.

And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard, the presence of ads or other marketing-style element is usually a good proxy for weeding out shitty commercial content.

> Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils salesmens forever too, so its not surprising

Most countries have national health services that have no (or at the very least less) bias to sell you something. Given the amount of these is finite, a list of their domains can be manually maintained to boost their results and outrank the other garbage.

> I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar with. But i don't really know where else to go.

Same here unfortunately and I have yet to find a solution.

> I absolutely expect Google to be able to detect someone's SEO life story bullshit at the top of a recipe and penalize that for ranking purposes.

Agreed, but those life stories are there because Google penalized the site if they weren't.

A whole lot of this is a problem of Google's own creation along with people adapting their behavior to fit how Google works.

In this case, Google should adapt but they are not.

SEO is not the reason recipes have life stories, the reason is that the life story part of the recipe adds copyright protection because the story is a "substantial literary expression". Recipes by themselves are not copyright-able as they are considered to be basic facts/ideas.

And Google won't penalize these sites because these sites are useful and contain useful recipes that many people want to find despite your particular annoyances you have about it. I do not want a search engine that filters out all these recipes.

Why would including a story with a recipe make a non-copyrightable recipe copyrightable?

Every recipe I can find on Google that isn't from a super-site with already strong SEO includes some sort of life anecdote. I find it hard to believe that:

1) This purported copyright trick even works, and

2) Everyone who publishes recipes online got the copyright trick memo, and

3) Everyone who publishes recipes online is interested in copyrighting their recipes as opposed to just having good ad revenue

I find it much easier to believe one of the following:

1) The life story section significantly improves SEO somehow, even if incidental. I'm not saying Google rewards life stories, but somehow there is a mechanism there that improves SEO, and people have cottoned on. Every recipe you're going find on Google has strong SEO, and hence every recipe you find has an SEO-improving life story attached to it.

2) Food bloggers include the stories for differentiation, to "build a stronger connection with their audience", and once a couple big ones started doing it, the rest followed.

3) Some sort of combination of 1 and 2.

Copyright law expressly does not cover recipes, because recipes are instructions on how to make a known product, and no lawmaking institution wants to criminalize Grandma copying a box recipe and giving it to her children and grandkids.

Photos and anecdotes are the common mechanisms used to make the recipe content copyrightable. Even physical cookbooks have these; they just seem longer on websites, because the format lends itself to more text-heavy presentation than a book, which normally has a full-page photo on one side and the recipe/short anecdote blurb on the other.

But don't take it from me, here's the FAQ from the US Copyright Office: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

> A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See Circular 33, Works Not Protected by Copyright.

And here is the relevant court case, Publications International, Ltd. vs Meredith Corp. with the legal criteria:

> In addition, nothing in our decision today runs counter to the proposition that certain recipes may be copyrightable. There are cookbooks in which the authors lace their directions for producing dishes with musings about the spiritual nature of cooking or reminiscences they associate with the wafting odors of certain dishes in various stages of preparation. Cooking experts may include in a recipe suggestions for presentation, advice on wines to go with the meal, or hints on place settings and appropriate music. In other cases, recipes may be accompanied by tales of their historical or ethnic origin.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=182201036052136...

I suspect the "Recipe Life Story" nonsense was sparked by a highly-publicised (in SEO circles) study several years ago, which claimed the average #1 result in SERPs contained ~2000 words. This started a race to make every web page much longer than it needed to be. The obvious way to pad out a recipe is to add a phony, rambling life story to it.

Several Google updates later (and after much SEO-driven copycatting), it's difficult to crack the top 10 without ~1500 words of nonsense before the recipe.

This is why we can't have nice things.

> And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard...

I took the opposite approach in my browser extension, detecting if a recipe is on the page and cloning it to the top of the page. I suppose you could add an accumulator to see how much visible text is on the page outside the recipe on pages where recipes are present to see the distribution of signal:noise. I'd be very interested in the results of a large-scale survey like that!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

recipes is a fun example.

The obvious success formula IMHO would be to have a file format for recipes (with a wrapper file format) and display those as search results under a "recipes search" tab. (The user picks his own tabs)

Then, like news results, the results have to be parsed and combined so that there is one main trend for mashed potatoes & gravy with creative alternatives presented in a beautiful crafted UI for the specific purpose that is cooking. One then elects to add the raisins and the cheese and stores this new combination some place private or public under a user name (possibly with pictures, the beef foo bar, soup and desert served with it) for future reference. If the raisins are a wonderful or terrible idea the rating can be merged into the mashed potato search result.

There is no room for good enough in my kitchen!

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