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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn’t write recipes, dedicated and passionate cooks write blogs with recipes in them.

I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing their story as well. They’re building their own cookbook essentially, not a bunch of lists.

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I _think_ OP is referring to the fact that most sites are forced into writing really long form posts because the format is "encouraged" by Google.

I don't know the ins and outs but my understanding is that if you don't follow the Google format then you recipe drops way down in Google search results.

No, they're forced into long form posts because recipes cannot be copyrighted. By adding a story you get something with copy rights.

IANAL but wouldn't you just get a copyright on the story and somebody could still extract all the necessary information for preparing the meal and publish it as a simple recipe?

IANAL either, but I believe that, yes, you could do just that. Of course you'd not have any copyright... :)

TBH I'm not entirely clear why the issue is so important to the people who publish these things, but clearly it is!

Why would they care about copyright? The sites these recipes sit on are ad-funded. Copyright would matter if they were selling these as books, not for free online where anybody can copy it, save it as a PDF etc.

I am sorry, but I believe you are mistaken. Recipe sharing worked one way for all of history until it became profitable to game the search engines by adding story-like content.

Could you source anything that proves this? I’ve always seen personalised stories with recipes, save for barebones websites that are aggregators and not personal blogs. Maybe consider food writing the same as technical writing? Nobody wants to read a dev blog with just snippets of code, they want the story too!

imagine stackoverflow came with a backstory when you googled "javascript http post" ! Same with "best brownies recipe"

There are lots of recipe aggregators that are similar to your stackoverflow needs. You should compare a dev blog post to a food blog.

@yunohn ? You think ppl searching for 'food blog stories outweighs' the people searching for food recipes?

Im honesty asking since. In my mind (i could very well be wrong). I. would think there are more ppl interested in 'how to make Great brownies' , then there are ppl searching for 'the backstory of the great brownie recipe' ?

Yet the results i get from my searches are more inline with if i searched for backstory of recipes.

Hell maybe im just searching with the wrong keywords ??

No, I’m saying Google doesn’t make the internet. Content creators want to add their own story and vibe to a simple recipe. You are free to use recipe aggregators that don’t, or make your own content?

This !

Or, more likely, they are just SEO optimising by providing a lot of prose (which Google has historically prioritised in search rankings) - the same way as all those AI-generated article summaries on the astroturfing sites

How do you propose anyone (Google or humans) differentiate between 500 mostly-similar recipes for brownies? I think HNers look at food blogs with a very depressing robotic expectation.

How is picking the one with the longest word count the best ??

This is what algorithms like PageRank were originally designed to do. Once upon a time the popular brownie recipes are the ones that everyone linked to, or the ones on the cooking sites that everyone linked to.

To be clear, I don't really care if the person wants to put their life story on their recipe site. I am annoyed that they are forced to do so in a really mechanical and disingenuous way just to make a Google algorithm happy - and as a result I lean heavily on the recipe sites that have alternate marketing channels/revenue streams (i.e. Serious Eats, ChefSteps, etc)

Google created the incentives that led to the current state of recipe pages.

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