I bet they've noticed 'more time spent on the page' since they added interesting stories to those recipes! "When I was little, Grandma did this and that and blah blah blah".

Of course, the time spent is cursing, and skimming and hunting to find useful info. No one is finding the story interesting, but it looks good on metrics?

I wonder if the above is accurate or not.

I think the idea is that Google allegedly prioritizes pages by user dwell time, the idea being that if someone spends 10 minutes on your page, it's more relevant than another page where the user only spends 5 seconds before closing the tab.

So forcing you to scroll through an essay on the complete history of nutmeg before you can see any of the ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie recipe may improve SEO

but every recipe site I've recently encountered, had a "jump to recipe" link right at the top

I use https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ for finding recipes, it has scraped over 2M of them. No distractions.

I have resorted to buying books after being burnt by just bad receips floating around on the Internet.

Wow, it's exactly the opposite for me - bought a few cookbooks at ~19-20 years old and used them for a few years. Now it's been a decade since I last touched any of my cookbooks because the recipes are really limited and just not that great compared to what you find on the internet.

I guess I avoid the junk because I have good instinct, I can usually tell if something is going to be bad based on the ingredients. Also if I'm looking to make something "basic" I'll specifically look for Alton Brown's recipe for it or sometimes Chef John's recipe. I also sometimes just use recipes for "inspiration" too - just to get a basic idea of what the ingredients are.