I've personally seen a page go from #20 to #2 just by adding 1000 extra words of content.
It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship.
It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces.
I think Google and Facebook have a lot to atone for.
It's honestly sad. Google could have gone in such a different direction. They're sitting on a gold mine but they caved into investor pressure to keep on pumping more gold instead of being happy with just the billions they would have made anyway.
I've been doing this for quite a while now, and it's placed in stark relief how bad the problem is getting.
It used to be that a few results were AMP, usually news sites, but you could easily bypass it via the (i) icon.
Then it was that most results that were content focused (not dynamic sites or web apps) were were AMP, but you could easily bypass it.
Today, most results are AMP, even for sites which are dynamic (e.g. Reddit), and to make matters worse, the (i) links of many websites have now started linking to AMP pages themselves.
You might be thinking "ah, well those are their self-hosted copies. Shouldn't that be fine? The problem is Google's use of AMP, not the format itself, right?"
Funny thing that: those "self-hosted" AMP pages also won't load with the above two blacklist rules.
Also, many image search results are now somehow AMP (...how does that even make sense? It's just an image, so just serve me the image!). And for a while, you couldn't bypass it at all.
It isnt and it is. With how many employees they have, it wouldnt be that hard to come up with a "preferlist" that always outranks other content, and have that list constantly maintained, verified, and checked. Googler runs across a high quality site, it gets nominated for the preferlist. Preferred site descends into clickbait, they get removed.
The problem both Google and Facebook have is because of their attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality, that they refuse to just say "we decided these sites are just better" like they should. The whole reason I go to google is because they are supposed to return better results.
Isn't the problem worse than that, though? These 'SEO hacked' pages probably have google ads on them, and that seems like an even better reason for google to not lowering their ranking.
Now Google has something called Auto Ads where it automatically inserts ads in your pages. And at the default setting, it inserts a lot of ads. In my test page, there were 7 ads on the page, and not even small ones.
It works from an SEO perspective but as a user, I really wish they'd do away with it.
[1] "How do I protect my recipe?" section of https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
Edit: correct phone autocorrect mistake
It'd likely be hard to prove for isolated incidences or sufficiently generic recipes, but but if someone extracted and republished recipes en masse, you could establish that they're deriving those recipes from your works and violating your copyright.
Edit: See my comment here[1] for more details and an example of the issue you run into, particularly with the "steps" component.
[1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
> In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
This seems like a good summary of a relevant case and the relevant copyright law[1]. The gist of it is that even if a work is copyrightable, that doesn't extend to facts contained within it (such as the ingredients and process required to make a dish).
[1] https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...
YES! I don't want your backstory. I don't want to be mean but I'm just not that interested in you Mr./Ms. random Internet poster. I would often just close the tab if I see these recipes. I didn't realize it was because of SEO. I thought it was some ego thing among the writers.
This site has recipes in exactly the format I want and it is to the point: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
1. Ingredients.
2. Instructions.
3. Notes/thoughts/musings/etc.
Sometimes section 3 is quite long, sometimes it's completely absent. It is *never" the first thing you see, ever. Why? Despite the fact that I'm one of the people who enjoys reading/writing that kind of stuff, most of the time when I'm looking at my blog I'm looking for ingredients ratios and instructions, so they are first.
I don't want to have to scroll through a bunch of noise when I'm trying to cook. Just like the reviews on sites like Amazon don't appear on the page before a picture of the product and its price/description, so are reflections on a recipe out of place before the recipe itself has been listed.
e.g. for chrome (I don't endorse this, just an example): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
A problem is that sometimes the bloggers will write modifications or amendments mixed into their prose, and not reference them in the actual recipe instructions (e.g. the recipe calls for 400g of flour, but somewhere in the autobiography, the author says "The recipe calls for 400g but I find 600g to produce a much better end result")
I think, ultimately, one should not google around for recipes from random bloggers, and instead only take recipes from actual cookbooks. When you find a random person's blog, you have no idea what their skill levels are, what their motivations are for writing(usually just to make $$$ via a blog). For example, I ran across a recipe which the end product had raw flour in it, and a commenter on the site said that they should put a warning for pregnant people to not do this, and the blogger came through and said that raw flour is not only not bad for pregnant women, but is actually good for pregnant women, which goes against all known advice from healthcare professionals.
It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well.
• an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume their regional growing conditions or food-product design carry over world-wide — so no "sticks" of butter, no "glugs" of oil (from what spout diameter?), no "drops" of flavorings, no "inches" of ginger, etc. Give me volumes! Weights! Molar concentrations! (Half-kidding on the last one.)
• put all references to an ingredient in the steps in bold, and always use the same name for an ingredient that the ingredients table itself uses.
• no implicit ingredients (yes, put the salt and water that the pasta gets boiled in, into the ingredients! Let me mise en place without reading the steps!) Also, don't say "200g sugar" if you mean "100g sugar for the cake sub-recipe; 100g sugar for the frosting sub-recipe." Break those out, so that the fact that those separate quantities should be kept separate is explicit, rather than something you must implicitly gather from the steps.
• or go further and make the ingredients table into its own kind of "pre-recipe" — a sequence of preparation steps. Not only "measuring things into bowls", but also steps such as: explicitly buying things day-of if they're best fresh; or defrosting, if the ingredient is often kept frozen (with defrosting times added to the total amount of time the recipe takes!); etc. Write down exactly what a chef would train their prep cooks to do for them in the preparation phase of this recipe.
• a print stylesheet that makes the webpage come out as a single compact printed page, with a big title, large text, a small picture of the finished product, and no dead space or colored backgrounds (or alternately, a link to a single-page pre-generated PDF with even-more exacting formatting.) I don't want my iPad (that keeps going to sleep and must be woken up with dirty fingers, and can get splattered by oil) in the kitchen; I want to print recipes and put them in transparent binder sleeves. Give me recipe pages I can both easily flip through, and easily find. Let me build a quality printed cookbook, one page at a time, out of my favourite selected recipes from your site.
• a universal "set serving size" client-side Javascript adjuster, which not only manipulates the ingredients but also the correct timings for steps that depend on weights (e.g. defrosting, searing.) None of this "until 165C internally" nonsense; I always buy the same cuts of meat, so calculate the time required for my food to come to temperature, and then tell it to me. Maybe also insert the adjusted amount of the ingredient being used into the text of the steps, so it actually says "add the milk (1tbsp)" rather than just "add the milk." (The ingredients list is for shopping/prep-phase; I should be able to cook without referring to it!)
• each ingredient name in the ingredients table should have a side-link to a page that talks about substitutes for that ingredient, and how to adjust recipes for that substitution. Ingredients with common substitutes should offer an adjustor select-box right there in the ingredients table, where tweaking it changes the recipe appropriately. (Which means the recipe can now include things that are highly-dependent, e.g. it can ask you what pasta you're using, and then embed in the steps the correct cooking time for that type of pasta; and since the recipe knows what kind of recipe it is, it can specify the al-dente time target if it's baked pasta, or the fully-cooked time target if it's a pasta salad.)
• When a recipe is actually just an arbitrary linearization of a few concurrent sub-recipes (e.g. a dish to cook, and a sauce you prepare and then pour over it right before serving), make this clear. Draw boxes around the sub-recipes' steps, and number those boxes. Then put a little boxes-and-arrows workflow diagram for how the numbered sub-recipes relate to each-other at the top of the steps. Represent each sub-recipe in the diagram as a box with a height proportional to how long its steps take—such that you can eyeball which sub-recipe you'll be done with first. Label the boxes with timers that should be set at the beginning of them (because almost always the end of a box is "take off heat" or "take out of oven.")
I'd bookmark a site like that directly, and use it religiously in preference to any other recipe provider.
Because they'd likely run afoul of copyright laws. A recipe in and of itself doesn't generally qualify for copyright protection, but a recipe cushioned in prose can be a copyrighted literary work. So anyone ripping the recipe out of it would infringe on the copyright of the literary work itself. See "How do I protect my recipe?" on [1].
A site like the one I'm describing doesn't have to use the same words the original site uses. In fact, I'd really hope it wouldn't, since these sites almost never use a standardized vocabulary, and in fact try as hard as they can to make their recipes into interesting prose (i.e. using a different word in reference to something each time they reference it) at the expense of clarity.
The "boiled-down form" of these recipes, would look less like prose text, and more like an RDF graph linking ingredient-noun vertices together using action-verb edges.
In fact, now that I think about it, it could probably be stored in a format machine-readable enough to function equally well as machinima choreography for a "cooking simulator", i.e. an HTML5 canvas app with an engine approximating a cooking game (e.g. Cooking Mama) but without the "game" part.
Such a "timeline view" of the recipe could actually keep track of the collection of pots/pans/bowls/etc. required in the recipe, and then visually display the current state of what's in each of them at each step, as you scroll through each step in the recipe's timeline. Like a visual debugger, for food.
The textual representation of the recipe would just be generated from that same non-textual data format, via a simple structured NLP rule-set. (Yes, you could instead throw the sort of algorithms they're using to generate baseball news coverage[1] at the problem, but we want standardized text, not stylized text.) Bonus: i18n for free. The normalized recipe data isn't "in" any language, so it's equally easy to write a ruleset for generating recipe-step prose that is in any language.
The resultant text of such a generative process shouldn't be copyright-infringing, even if it matched some other recipe word-for-word by coincidence. When you "extract" only the bare facts from a work and discard the rest, you're not making a derivative work; a work of yours that employs those "extracted" facts is not a derivative of the source of those facts. (If it were, then every summary or review of a work, would be in violation of the copyright of the work it's summarizing or reviewing, since the bare facts referenced were gleaned from the original work.)
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/associated-press-expands-...
In this case it's true the derivative work (the recipe) wouldn't be copyrightable, but that doesn't absolve it from being considered a copyright violation of the original work.
If you can show you independently created that recipe, then you're protected from the above assertion that it was a derivative of that copyrighted work. But if you're compiling a database of normalized recipes via scraping recipe content online, it'd be pretty easy for a copyright holder to establish this argument doesn't hold water.
[1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
What I'm talking about here, is effectively "extracting the semantics of someone else's source code/recipe, in a way where humans are "firewalled off" from the particulars of the original prose of the code/recipe; and then using the described semantics to write your own code/recipe that has those same semantics."
This is explicitly something that's been decided as not copyright-infringing; which is why IP lawyers have to go after cases where there was literal plagiarism of source code, however small.
The big example of this is Google v. Oracle, where API header files used in Android were literally plagiarized from OpenJDK. Google argued that this was fair use, as there was essentially no other form these files could take while retaining Java compatibility. But this argument was shut down/never resolved in their favor.
All Google had to do, in the end, to avoid infringement, was to do a ground-up rewrite of those Android API header files (which ended up almost exactly the same as they were before the rewrite.) Note that they still rewrote them using an understanding of the bare facts that those header files contain, that could only have been gained by reading the original header files themselves. And yet the new derivative work, being "not literally plagiarism", was no longer considered an infringing derivative work.
[1] You can patent algorithms (sort of, as business processes), but that's a different thing. Nobody's ever going to sue a recipe website for patent infringement, even if they described Nestle's patented chocolate-enrobing technique, because a description of a patented process is not a use of that patent. Patents are inherently public information, and people can share and reprint the information in them around all they like. Instead, a patent owner would only sue other companies who used the patented technique for commercial gain, for not first acquiring a license for the patented technique. (Google never sued bloggers for describing the PageRank algorithm; but up until last year, Google did sue other search-engine companies for implementing PageRank without a license.)
Gradually beat in just enough milk to make frosting smooth and spreadable. If frosting is too thick, beat in more milk, a few drops at a time. If frosting becomes too thin, beat in a small amount of powdered sugar. Frosts 13x9-inch cake generously, or fills and frosts an 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake.
The only "algorithmic" component to that step is that you add milk. The fact that you do so gradually, use a beater during the process, how you identify when you've added enough, how to correct for deviations in viscosity of the mixture, etc are all part of the "source code" rather than the algorithm and wouldn't be something you could republish without being considered a derivative work.
The recipe without those contextual components may still be useful for those sufficiently familiar with baking, but for many people following a recipe, they'd likely need such contextual components to follow the recipe successfully.
[1] https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/vanilla-buttercream-fro...
I would disagree. Here's what I learned from your quoted paragraph, expressed in pseudo-Prolog:
- beatInto(FrostingMixInBowl, Milk, $BeaterSpeed) => increaseQty(FrostingMixInBowl, Milk).
- beatInto(FrostingMixInBowl, IcingSugar, $BeaterSpeed) => increaseQty(FrostingMixInBowl, IcingSugar).
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), absorbancyPerUnitTime(FrostingMixInBowl)).
- nonNewtownianViscosity(FrostingMixInBowl).
:. invProportional(absorbancy(FrostingMixInBowl), $BeaterSpeed). // implication from standard library
:. require(maxThreshold($BeaterSpeed)). // implication from standard library
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), AmbientHumidity).
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), AmbientTemperature).
- proportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), currentQty(FrostingMixInBowl, Milk)).
- invProportional(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), currentQty(FrostingMixInBowl, IcingSugar)).
- target(viscosity(FrostingMixInBowl), centiPoise(10000)). //see https://www.globalpumps.com.au/list-of-typical-viscosities
...and then some stuff about how much frosting we're making here, but without the context required to translate those figures into absolute extruded surface area.
Anyway, do you see what I'm getting at with this? We're describing a system of dynamic constraints. What you generate from this "knowledge base" is an action plan that routes you through the system of dynamic constraints to achieve the target (in this case, icing of a specified absolute viscosity.) The constraints are generative, where constraints asserted together produce further constraints, and those constraints can be translated into structured-text warnings like:
• "the icing is too thick to absorb milk at faster than N mL per second; if you introduce it faster than that, the milk will bounce off the surface of the icing rather than absorbing, and probably splatter you in the face."
• "beating the icing too fast shears/aerates it, increasing its viscosity, making it unable to absorb anything, meaning that anything introduced to the icing will bounce off the surface of the icing and splatter you in the face."
Such a system also allows the resolution of ambiguities, where instead of saying "if the icing is too thick", it can know the variables that affect viscosity, and so just ask you to set those variables (i.e. the ambient temperature and rH value for your kitchen) either in your user preferences or at the recipe header; and take that into account to compute initial quantities for ingredients that should produce a viscosity in no need of further adjustment. (But it could also generate the structured text explaining what actions it knows about for this step that increase and/or decrease viscosity — you know, just in case you messed up and didn't follow its perfect robot plan.)
Note that this isn't super out-there tech. People build models that do these computations all the time. Which people? The operational engineers in charge of the day-to-day operations of baked-good and candy factories.
I'm just suggesting, in essence, a generalized domain-specific abstract machine for modelling all such problems in an easy way (rather than rebuilding it half from scratch in spreadsheets each time), such that you could just as easily describe the dynamic-constraint system underlying a steak as one underlying a Mars bar.
...and then using all that just to emit recipe prose. :P
(But you could also use it as the "mental model" a multi-purpose robotic kitchen could use to generate action plans, of course.)
1. Make entertaining videos of you making the food. These aren't recipes; they're essentially recipe reviews, allowing people to decide whether they want to make this.
2. Share those videos on other channels (Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, your own personal blog, etc.)
3. Link, from the video, and in those channels, to the clean-and-simple no-nonsense standalone recipe page.
(AllRecipes itself is actually somewhat good, by the criteria I listed. It's semi-structured, is sort of serving-size adjustable, and it prints acceptably. It could be a lot better, though. And, since it's user-generated content — a "social network for recipes" — and provides that free-form "description" field at the beginning of each recipe, recipes there can still fall victim to the same sort of long-winded pseudo-blogging content. Not everyone uses the website "for what it's for", i.e. the strategy described above.)
Yeah, I went down this rabbit hole a few weeks ago while I was trying to find the perfect pizza dough recipes.
On the other hand, I've had much better success getting right to the ingredient list and instructions using Pinterest and Instagram instead.
I've thought that the reason recipes are hell on the internet is to need to make space for display ads, e.g. putting the content in slideshows where some slides are ads.
DuckDuckGo's Yummly-powered instant answers work fine (one click, no scrolling to ingredients, although there seem to be affiliate links to them involved).
This is old journalism 101.
I remember hearing about this years ago in civics class.
Newspapers put all the meat in the headline and first couple paragraphs. Old newspapers are a Google search away to verify. Lots of the same behavior as you see on sites like Huff Post.
It would be more accurate to say SEO borrowed a habit of shallow attention grabbing from news editors.
But humans have evolved into wanting depth in their ideas.
We’re into more detail all the way through now.
Look at popular media, sci fi and magical worlds, deep character connectivity. Look at Serial and anything Ken Burns.
Depth is cared about AND sells.
Bloomberg is relevant cause Bloomberg is rich. That Bloomberg is not capable of depth isn’t a surprise.