Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiborsaas | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com