Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattknightlewis | Hacker News Reader

What I really need is a browser extension that recognizes I'm on a recipe website and automatically scrolls past the recipe writer's whole autobiography to the section with the ingredients and instructions.

View on HN

people make comments like this often and it makes me wonder if you actually really need it, because you can very easily find several extensions that do just that. As an experiment, I copied your comment into google verbatim, and found exactly what you are looking for.

I don't understand. But then what do I have to complain about on the internet?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...

Can't believe I didn't know this exists, just installed the Chrome version, thanks!

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

I tried it and it didn't even work on seriouseats, a very well known recipe site with (IMO) way too much text before the recipes.

There are dozens of variants of this app, here's one built by a friend of mine: http://getrecipecart.com/

Like colpabar said, I think this is somewhat of a problem for experienced cooks but it's not the main issue faced by beginners, nor a big pain point. I believe this is true because I saw at least 20 startups build some version this in 2020-2021 and they mostly perished in the idea maze.

I am not a beginner myself but I would expect it would actually be a much larger pain point for a beginner. If they don't know where to start or what they need to do they may get overwhelmed by some 2000 word essay totally irrelevant to the process. Or get tripped up by extra advanced options listed in there. Just need the ingredients and the steps and maybe links to other instructions. Like if a step is "Dice the onions", link over to a page about dicing.

I am in the process of writing my own scraper for recipe sites that grabs only the recipes and parses them into a machine readable (searchable) format. Turns out you don't need much for parsing, because an incredibly large percentage of these sites use wordpress, and either the tasty recipes plugin or wprm (wordpress recipe maker) plugin.

The only tedious part at this point is writing the different search crawlers for each site - some are reusable while others are not.

I had assumed that this would have been much more difficult, but after a weekend of writing the cheerio utils for pulling the recipes only from tasty or wprm tags, I found myself nearly done. The frontend and search engine tuning will take much longer.

It would be really cool if recipe sites could just include a recipe instead of a useless blog post punctuated by ads every 4 sentences, but these people clearly don't want me using their site in the "right" way. Oh well.

Recipes cant be copyrighted, so bloggers write long-form narratives ahead of the recipe to make the contents of the page intellectual property.

a substantial number of people (not me) do enjoy reading the stories, they get something out of it, damn normies.

Me too, but not when I'm in a rush, but the JS is flashing off and on, moving things around the page, and generally making for a miserable experience.

Maybe they could just put it after the recipe???

Isn’t Google responsible for this? They rank results based on how long users stay on the page, plus how much they scroll. Forcing all those “when I was a girl in Sicily…” stories at the top of a recipe that nobody wants.

Source?

My understanding is Google wants pages to be different and have a lot of keywords.

If you have a generic recipe website with just the simple cooking instructions:

1. it's going to have less key words

2. it's not going to look different from hundreds of other websites like this

This doesn't help your wider problem, but here's the recipe section of my website. I believe it has more of a content style that you're looking for.

https://www.benovermyer.com/recipe/

I've found that a lot of the recipe sites I use have a button that takes you directly to the recipe (after all I'm told that the life story is for SEO purposes). I just am so used to skipping over the cruft that I skip the button as well.

I’d add a browser extension that reroutes from or preloads content from sights that load as you scroll like the link for this does.

I remember there being a very good extension that did exactly this.

It got review bombed by food bloggers, and they ended up taking it offline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com