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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

The acid test: can I find a brownie recipie without any fucking around?

...nope, I still can't.

Just opened incognito window and entered "brownie recipe"... the first link is to "Love and Lemons" site which seems pretty good - there is a pretty small introduction, but then there is ingredients list, steps, etc.. top 5 links all look pretty good to me. (At least in web design area... I have no ideas if recipes themselves are tasty or not)

Maybe it's a regional thing (I am in the US)? Or your profile is messed up? Try searching in incognito window.

The first time I visited "Love and Lemons" (the first non-sponsored link I got) I scrolled down looking for the actual recipie until I gave up. Right before you made this comment I checked again and found the link to the recipie under the introduction as you described.

Most if not all recipe sites have a jump to recipe button, as de facto required by search engines.

Way too much fucking around.

to click on a button?

Yes. I wasn't searching for a button, I was searching for a brownie recipie

If the developer has to put that button on the site, they’ve already failed. They know it’s a poor design, and are trying to add features to point to that will absolve them, instead of fixing the core problem which wouldn’t force the user to look for a skip button. First time users of a site have no reason to look for a button like that, when the standard control of every other site for decades has been to scroll.

I also just went to the site. When I went to tap the jump link, a modal popped up and blocked me. I dismissed that and tapped the link and it jumped me down the page to yet another request to sign up for a newsletter I don’t want. Now the top 3rd of the page is a video that started to auto-play; I had to tap to dismiss that. When I scrolled into the recipe section I got yet another modal trying to get me to sign up for an account so I can save the recipe… as if bookmarks don’t exist. I dismissed that, and now I can see the recipe. There are 3 ads in the middle of the recipe that break it up, some with more auto-playing video, and the scroll keeps readjusting itself based on ads and BS popping in and out. The bottom of the page also has an ad banner to dismiss, a bookmark icon that bounces occasional (which is certainly just another attempt to get me to create an account), links to other recipes are sliding in and out depending on the direction I scroll, to try to get me to go other places on the site… and to top it off, the Pinterest flag blocks content, depending on where I scroll, while sometimes being blocked itself by the aforementioned recipe slide-in.

How can anyone defend all this? It’s horrible.

I'm not defending it. It's a result of google's ranking system+ad system. All these descriptions are not for users to read, these are for google crawler to rank higher in search+to get more money from randomly placed ads. If you don't do this, chances are high your website will rank lower compared to someone that did this considering other factors are the same. I'm just saying that out of the all bad options, this option with a button is less bad, you skip all(most) unnecessary stuff with a button click

I think the main point is that all this trash is a problem Google created, and has no incentive to fix. The web would be a much better place with these practices weren’t the foundation of SEO.

Yes, issue is why this button even exist instead of actual content being first and foremost

Is that really a ranking signal?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brownie+recipe&ia=web

Returned Love and Lemons first too. Never heard of them, but their SEO must be amazing.

I'm pretty sure it's because they integrated some google thing in order so show that rating and reviews right below the search result. It has the highest rating/amount or reviews ratio so it feels like this logic is putting it to the first result. Will be not surprised if most of these comments and reviews are some language models talking to each other, it's a bit uncommon to see THOUSANDS of comments, ratings and reviews on a recipe site, probably SEO optimisation.

Kagi gave me the same

So kagi displays spam in the same way as other search engines do

I get BBC Good Food as the first response, which is even better.

Just checked out Love and Lemons. Sorry but I can't say it impressed me at all. The vast majority of the page is blogspam garbage. Nobody needs a ten-paragraph introduction and an explanation of why you're using cocoa powder and vanilla in a brownie recipe.

Interestingly the first result for "brownie recipe" for me is BBC Food which is about as close to no-BS as you'll find.

Your brownies are probably going to suck. Just because you can't be arsed to read more than two sentences about how to do something doesn't mean others can't.

It's 299 words (so close to a round number!) of worse-than-useless filler before the recipe. You get two amazon sponsored links and one blog plug for some author with that. There's also an interstitial you have to click through.

I can see why GP was not impressed.

The very first thing on the page is a "Jump to recipe" link. If you too are a victim of dwindling attention spans like the rest of us, you have the option to skip straight past the beautiful photos and background.

Looks like these spam pages work because some people actually like them...

That would be a major problem for hand curated indexes.

> So this fall, as I flipped through Michelle Lopez’s new book Weeknight Baking, her recipe for Boxed Mix Brownies, From Scratch caught my eye. Would I finally be able to make homemade brownies that would be just as delicious as the ones from a box?

I can’t even fathom how anybody thinks that this is fine on any level (from the mentioned site, the first result about brownies for me, and one of the first few paragraphs). For a while, I rather pay for cooking and recipe books, because wasted time on these texts would worth way more than that money. Especially that even the recipes themselves are terrible most of the time on the internet.

But after a thread a few months ago here on HN, in which people praised w3schools how it’s really a good site, I’m not surprised on anything. If the people who really should know how these things work, and that there are better free alternatives for all content on that site, even encourage this bullshit, then this won’t improve at all.

The other advantages of buying a recipe book:

- you can take notes in the margins

- you can find your favorite recipes quickly because the pages are all stained and wrinkled

- you can reward the author for all the time they spent testing and honing those recipes

The real depressing thing here is the amount of whining about "wasted time" from folks looking for free cooking instructions on the 'Net. It's almost as bad as the "gimme teh codez" jerks on forums.

FWIW, I like this brownie recipe (and have purchased the book it comes from, twice): https://www.seriouseats.com/bravetart-glossy-fudge-brownies WARNING: contains even more words than the "love and lemons" page.

They’re not free, and never were. Tech bros just telling you, that you pay more, if you don’t pay in cash.

I was recently gifted a recipe book via Amazon. I was excited until I opened it up—it was just low quality LLM generated recipes, poorly typeset. There's no escape.

Actual issue is why "jump to merit of page" link is needed at all, not ones ability (or lack of) toactively filter content while reading

Never tell a Googler what the metric is.

Cue a flood of aspiring L6 promo packets with detailed numbers on improved brownie recipe ranking.

Hey, as long as it gets Sally’s Baking Addiction[0] ranked at the top I’m all for it.

0: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/

I googled MIL-C-44072 and it popped right up.

http://everyspec.com/MIL-SPECS/MIL-SPECS-MIL-C/MIL-C-44072C_...

I had to squint to see the actual content

That’s what she said about you, too. Hey-o!

Go back to a simpler time... `before:2015 inurl:blogspot.com`

The article says they're announcing in advance, so maybe whatever they plan to do hasn't happened yet.

I just use the Wikimedia Cookbook: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

I'm sure you have a recipe already, but I'd like to highly recommend Stella Parks' brownie recipe, and even more highly recommend her blondie recipe with malted milk and browned butter.

My go to site for baking recipes is Smitten Kitchen.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Asmittenkitchen....

I realize adding `site:...` is probably fucking around. But trust me, her brownie recipes are worth it. :-)

Isn’t the point of Google search to not have to do that?

Sure, that's why I added the disclaimer. I'm just trying to help Fricken out with some good brownie recipes.

Google lists dozens of recipe sites when I search for "brownie recipes" and honestly, how many different ways can you change a basic brownie recipe. So I'm sure almost any of them will do. Any seems like reasonable result. I'm not sure what algorithm Google should use to pick the best or most reliable recipe site.

I just happen to know, having cooked many of SKs recipes, that they are good recipes that almost anyone can follow.

They're not trying to find a good brownie recipe. They're using it as a test phrase for search engines.

My go-to site is King Arthur's 200th Anniversary Cook Book. Literally zero fucking around, packed with every classic baking recipe known to man, and gobs of straight-forward baking chemistry lessons a five year old could understand. Empowerment.

Katherine Hepburn has the brownie thing smacked down. Look no further.

Maybe some browser extension that extracts just recipe from all the ads and superfluous narrative crap?

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