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Comment by all2 | Hacker News Reader

That sounds remarkably similar to how recipes are shared in blogs. There's a huge amount of story, and then at the tail end there's the recipe. It's all for engagement, but I'm never engaged. If I'm looking for a recipe, I want to know the recipe so I can make it. I don't care about what the blogger did last weekend or in college.

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> There's a huge amount of story, and then at the tail end there's the recipe. It's all for engagement, but I'm never engaged.

It's not about engagement, it's about copyright.

Recipes - in the form of lists of ingredients and the method - are not typically protected.

However, add a huge rambling story about how Grandma handed this recipe down to you when you were five and on holiday with her in $place, hey presto, it's protected.

It's not for engagement. Some sites have now a Jump to recipe button. It's for google that said that if you write normal text they will send you a ton of traffic. What people figured out was that unless you spam the recipe with keywords repeated at least 20 times, the google bot will not understand what the text is about. Maybe google was forced to do this, but that's how it works and it contradicts how they said it works.

I read that the recipes are actually bullshit. Written by content farms eating instant noodles, not anyone remotely involved with a kitchen.

Google* how long to pressure cook white or brown rice and you’ll see widely differing answers. Like shots all over a dartboard. They can’t all be correct — it’s just rice.

I wonder if many of them care more about CPM rates and page visits than actual recipe accuracy.

  *or Bing, DDG, Kagi, etc if you prefer although I haven’t tried.

I would somewhat disagree with that. My household eats rice on a daily basis and the timings for different kinds of rice varies wildly. Basmati, Sona masuri, jasmine, risotto, jeera samba rice have very different water and rice measures. And that's just white rice! Other rice variations are a whole different ball game.

I strongly recommend the books Cooking for Geeks and The Food Lab. In both books, the authors explore a variety of different approaches and show their math.

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