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Comment by hereonout2 | Hacker News Reader

You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content, there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.

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You are lucky if they even answer.

Most of those are like:

    $movie release date
    
    <five paragraphs of garbage>
    
    While we don't know the actual $movie release date yet, ...

These are the worst things ever

I have noticed that a lot. For example:

What is the price of the Switch 2?

The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>

Recipe for Foo. Foo has always been my favorite dish. I fondly remember all the times my grandma made this for me. My grandma, who was born on August 2, 1946, as the daughter of… (10 more pages of text) To cook Foo the way my grandma did, you first need some Bar. Bar is originally native to the reclusive country of… (20 more pages of text)

Yeah recipes are the worst. I least the acknowledge themselves and give you a “jump to recipe” button most of the time. I sometimes hit the print button and just use the preview screen too.

I don’t think recipes are much at actual fault here. It seems the fault of search engines preferring returning recipes with longer stories over just-the-recipe blogs or sites like AllRecipes. We humans just have to suffer as a result of the artificial selection of what the search engines wants for us to experience.

It's not just that: recipes on their own are, AIUI, not copyrightable.

https://cookingforengineers.com is giving 500s for me. Per the Wayback machine it was working as recently as last month. They do include background stories but they're much better about this sort of thing. (The old-school aspects of the page layout also help.)

Paprika (an app for storing recipes) can parse out the ingredient list and directions from a webpage. It's surprisingly good at it.

thank you for this! i'll check it out

You forgot 4 paragraphs text about how they went on a journey of self discovery, that lead to them spending time in the remote village of Y, learning the traditional methods of cooking the dish.

The dish in question is a ham sandwich.

I don't even know if the recipes themselves are real and tested any more or just slop.

It seems like it's more often than not that I'm coming across dishes that just do not make sense, or are poorly plagiarized by someone who doesn't understand the cuisine they're trying to replicate with absolute nonsense steps or substitutions or quantities. I used to have a great success rate when googling for recipes but now it's almost all crap, not even a mixed bag.

Big Mama's Best Brownie Recipe.

Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.

This might be a hot take but I'm usually fine with this... If its authentic which most of the time it isn't.

But I don't know, I feel like personal stories are what really makes a blog worth reading?

I don't like it when it's unnecessary "info dump" type. Like, "we all know the benefits of garlic (proceeds to list the well known benefits of garlic)". It's not personal or relevant.

I just want there to be a well formatted way of viewing the recipe at the bottom for quickly checking the recipe on a second or third visit.

Sure, but there's a time and a place, and when I'm looking for a recipe, especially if I'm landing on a site for the first time and don't even know who the author is yet, it's the time and place to do the shopping or the cooking, not for reading even an interesting origin story.

I discovered justtherecipe.com and never went back. So far it's free and ad-free, though I suspect that will end soon.

Now that’s a recipe I would read. We can fold in the failing publishing industry and have authors presented by King Biscuit Flour.

This is usually okay... what's not okay is that usually this narrative is broken up by ads, a constantly changing layout as you scroll, and eventually jumping so many times you can't resume scrolling, then eventually crashing because too many trackers/ads/etc overwhelmed the browser (on mobile).

No, it's not okay. I used google to look for a brownie recipe; I want a brownie recipe and nothing else.

And then the part where you have to create an account to read past the SEO filler :(

It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and reviews. This is how it's supposed to work, IMHO.

Outdoor Gear Lab is great, it’s true.

Nailed it :D

And that when the adverts refresh all the content on the page shifts and you lose track of what you have read.

or even worse, the page itself is just an AI summary of the topic

not to mention the mandatory cloudflare "are you human" pre-vetting page Im seeing on 15% of sites.

jesus wept.

And that I often have to wait for it to automatically get through it, which it does not, requiring me to click to verify I am indeed a human. Even if I am not even using Tor or VPNs.

Assuming that clicking to verify even works, which is shaky. On Safari, it seems to just loop me most of the time... which bums me out, since I generally don't have many issues with Safari.

Good news! Now they are often AI drivel too. So you can get an AI summary of more AI crap.

This is most of the results on the first page of Google search are AI slop.

Either that or fifty paragraphs of ai slop blathering in circles about the topic.

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