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Comment by AwkwardPanda | Hacker News Reader

It can get frustrating skimming through text walls just to find the recipe on blogs/sites. Authors do it to get high ranking on Google. You can use OnlyRecipe.app to extract the recipe information. It works on almost all sites/blogs which follow a recipe standard when they post.

You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeak...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1602130759

Short 50-seconds video on how recipe camera scanner works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziSNwjv9PXo

Currently working on a feature that lets you share recipe "image cards" with your friends.. Something like this https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png

Let me know if you'd use that feature

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The irony of having an ad supported app to scrape recipes from ad supported websites. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Technology companies selling a solution to a problem created by technology companies instead of coming together to fix the original problem. This is the world we live in.

The original problem is that people want to Google for recipes and not pay for them.

As a cook there are several solutions to this:

1) pay for a subscription from vendors who are in business to sell recipes, such as Cooks Illustrated

2) get recipes from companies that provide them as a complement because they sell something else, generally food-related products. For instance King Arthur Baking has good recipes, and many are available from food companies such as Tyson, Kraft, and Betty Crocker. Grocers also have many recipes. These sources aren't interested in spamming users with ads because the website is one big ad.

3) Buy cookbooks, they're not expensive.

But yeah as long as people want to crank search terms into Google and get "free" stuff, it's going to be ad-infested, and then other ad-seeking folks are going to run their shakedown operations just like the adblock extensions charge money to advertisers to let their ads through.

3) buy cookbooks

While cookbooks are great they're not easily searchable. If only I could ingest every recipe from every cookbook I bought into a personal database.

Hey that'd be a neat app idea!

this is actually already a thing. Damn i forget the app but it exists I did the trial once

https://www.eatyourbooks.com/

@AwkwardPanda

And how does a site opt out of your scraping? Do you have a unique user-agent when you scrape? A set of IPs?

You know the answer to this.

Hi, currently there is nothing of this sort. The user agents are random. I have a couple of servers doing the scraping in real-time. The IPs are not static.

Let me see if I can build a opt-out list. But wouldn't it beat the entire purpose of this app?

You should just declare your bot as a user-agent. Most publishers won't even bother to do it, but leaving a publisher an option is the correct etiquette for any bot. Random user agents is cloaked scraping.

FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies. https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...

They're full of shit, though. Crack open the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and find a cookie recipe, then search for the same recipe name online. You're going to find 1000 word essays about Dear Meema's Secret Snickerdoodle recipe... followed by the same damn recipe as the BH&G cookbook.

This is an anecdote which clearly does not cover all cases. I think the presumption is that cooking sites are nothing but spam, but the fact that so many high-profile cooks complained about this perviously shows that this is not the case and that their livelihoods would be affected by apps like these.

Wrong, "foodies" are about to get eaten alive by people sick of their shit. The only people complaining loudly about that were the people propagating the BS. I certainly don't see any complaints from users mentioned in that article.

If your business model relies on people scrolling past a bunch of filler to get to a short list of instructions, be prepared for people to get tired of it and solve the problem.

Agree. Their business model isn't a business model. A recipe to the audience we're talking about is worth...nothing. So you're building a business model on something that has near-zero value. And try to still get some value out of it regardless:

"Essays meanwhile allow bloggers to make money off search engine optimization (or SEO, which scans the essays for keywords and relevant search terms) and ads allow the blog to remain free for readers."

So here they openly admit to the hack. This entire fraud is one app or google algorithm tweak away from being annihilated.

It should be seen as a side job with expectation zero, any money is a bonus, not something you do to "feed your family". I mean, read this rant:

https://www.eater.com/2020/3/31/21201374/why-are-free-online...

Delusional.

Interesting that [1] the website in question has been removed and replaced with an apology.

[1] https://recipeasly.com/

The original tweet https://twitter.com/redman/status/1366137187117506560

Spending time writing user-hostile recipe for SEO purpose, then someone else building an app trying to undo this and finally the end user spending time installing app, scanning QR code and going back to the original user-hostile website because the app didn't get milk quantity. Now I'm too tired to cook anything.

Hey can you share the url.. I will fix small issues like this..

It's visible on your video ;-)

All we're missing is crypto/NFTs to create a full circle of tech bullshit.

> Authors do it to get high ranking on Google [..]

I believe it's more likely that it's to do with whether you can or can't copyright a listing of ingredients and method.

If you add enough of a story, you definitely can.

No. As somebody who pays recipe creators and publishes recipes this is just wrong.

The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it

> The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it

Separate in a copyright sense?

A web scraping bot won't necessarily make that distinction.

Yes in a copyright sense. Recipes are also separate in a technical sense too because for SEO purposes publishers use markup to help crawlers understand recipes.

Could be wrong, but I thought it was so that you spend more time on their website and have a chance to see more ads

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