Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.
How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.
And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one.
I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.
Cooks Illustrated is amazing, the rigor they go through testing everything, and adapting to available ingredients, makes for such incredible reliability!
Or you could buy a cookbook. There's a bunch of them out there. Some are good, some are bad, some are long-lived classics, some are deep dives into a particular cuisine by someone who knows it inside out.
You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...
Yes! Books. Most cookbooks have a lot of full color pictures. They also lack ads, if they have a story to give context to the writer’s relationship with the cuisine it will be a few paragraphs introducing the whole book rather than at the head of every recipe. They do not have any DRM; once you buy one it is yours to keep, give, or loan as you will.
If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying.
It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!
I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?
>Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots?
Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant.
Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners.
When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for."
Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic.
Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers.
Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.
Long time ago having your site in a high quality curated directory like DMOZ boosted your search ranks a lot.
I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.
8 fl oz of flour spooned into the measuring cup or 4.5 oz. by weight.
I'm not at all trying to be snarky here. Like any other specialization people who cook have organic terminology that is useful to the in-group but confusing to the out-group. A /24 isn't the same as a class C network but we all know what is being conveyed.
And you'll get much more accurate measurements of small quantities measuring by volume instead of weight since kitchen scales aren't that accurate. Knowing that 0.25 tsp is about a gram for just about any granular thing will probably do better than your scale.
It also helps convey the sig figs in recipe. Very few recipes have a tolerance of 1 g. Even finicky bread doesn't get that accurate so it's ridiculous when some bloggers write something like 113 g when without question the recipe was originally formulated to be 4.0 oz and you just messed up the conveyed tolerances by blindly converting.
I understand how to make bread, bakers-percentages, etc. It's just that when it comes to flour a cup is a terrible measurement, due to the way it packs and the different volume involved in various varieties/types of flour.
Most of the time when I'm cooking and I see an American recipe I just google the conversion; a cup of milk is easy to deal with. Just a minor irritation most of the time, but for some things it matters.
Yeah, cups of flour annoy me to no end. The difference between a cup of packed down flour in the bag vs flour that's been sifted is something like 30% by my rough estimate.
I know that different cultures are different, but I always think of Americans as being (kitchen) gadget-obsessed.
Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks.
(I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)
It's because Americans mainly cook with volumes ("1 cup flour") and not masses ("100g flour"). Just look at any American recipe book - it will use volumes instead of weights.
You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good.
You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.
Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.
How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.