Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

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Because "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the rich media carousel previews, etc. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

If you want to know what categories of things will have especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results, look at the other things that google encourages developers to semantically tag and compete for use of the shiny results page features. A couple interesting ones:

  Ecommerce (monetizable sales):
  - Books
  - Review snippet
  - Software app
  - Events
  
  Google Maps data ingestion:
  - Local Business
  
  Youtube previews:
  - Video
  - Movie
  
  Job search:
  - Employer Aggregate Rating
  - Estimated salary
  - Job Posting
  
  Knowledge graph:
  - COVID-19 announcements (ooo, topical!)
  - Dataset
  - FAQ
  - Fact Check

Recipes are something that people who search for recipes do several times a week, so the algorithms identified this as a Thing with High DAU's. Semantic tags then makes it easier to identify "this is a recipe page", but that means for such a crowded category it's a race to the bottom with optimization and ad-stuffing (more life story == more inline ad blocks).

Unfortunately, it's against google's interest to promote to-the-point recipe pages that have fewer embedded AdWords blocks.

Projects like OP probably just parse out the semantic tags and throw away the rest of the content. This could easily be a browser extension.

I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to test:

"pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent: https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/

"lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good: https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/

"sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/

Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads you see and I can't judge the quality as well, buy at least the sites are quite usable. I'd be more pissed off by a missing ingredient than having to scroll a screen or two.

The lasagne recipe page would be one I count as bad. There's a lot of useless text before the recipe. The other two result pages are good.

Interesting enough, the big name recipe sites: Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc. all are short and to the point. But for some reason the crappy recipe sites outperform them on Google.

The Lasagna recipe is an independent cooking blogger (note the "Hi there, I'm Holly!" in the top-right corner). Food Network, Allrecipes, Tegel, and other sites mentioned are not promoting a specific person, but an entire brand. Babish is the exception to this rule, but he "changed the game" by going for YouTube instead of blogs.

Although the optimization is infuriating, in my search to become a decent cook, I have found more success following specific writers instead of a top result/highest rated meal. Many of these writers self-promote (and cross-promote) on sites with the same template as spendwithpennies.com

I wouldn't be surprised if that annoying SEO template was designed in collaboration with Cookbook publishers. The "anecdote before recipe" style was made famous in Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, and took on a variety of forms throughout the 20th century.

> Babish is the exception to this rule, but he "changed the game" by going for YouTube instead of blogs.

I think this (or a hybrid approach) was already a thing. See Food Wishes (Chef John), which has been using a similar model for a while.

The "Jump To Recipe" button on the Lasagna page took to straight to the ingredients

NYT recipes are almost always in the top 3 results for me, I don’t think they are being outperformed that much if at all.

I don't know how to make it, a list of ingredients wouldn't help me much. That article is a bit too superficial for me.

Actually, video recipes are the best imho: https://www.youtube.com/c/yousuckatcooking :)

I wonder if it has to do with the type of food. “Hummus recipe” gets you the entire history of chickpeas: https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-r...

This is the kind of recipe I see most often when searching for recipes. I wonder whether GP was a little lucky with his/her three links. (The lasagna recipe was an example of an SEO'd recipe.)

> Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads you see

Be careful. I also have an ad blocker and sent a fun link to my mom a friend had sent me and she saw Alllllllllll the ads. It was not a fun link for her. Didn’t even think of it before sending.

There's a new one coming for a Media Fact Check as well. https://schema.org/MediaReview

There are browser extensions which do this: - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter... - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

This is interesting. Looks like the app might be just parsing this schema from the webpage and adding a nice ui.

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