It's viewed as a DRM measure. Recipes are not copyrightable unless they are attached to a story. It's probably an urban legend, but can't blame poor food bloggers from acting on it.

It's not an urban legend in the United States:

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Based on this reasoning, the United States Copyright Office Compendium, the Office’s manual for examiners, states that a mere listing of ingredients or contents is not copyrightable, as lists are not protected by copyright law (chapter 314.4(F)). The Office has also stated that a “simple set of directions” is uncopyrightable.

In addition, courts have found that recipes are wholly factual and functional, and therefore uncopyrightable. As the Sixth Circuit described in Tomaydo-Tomahdo, LLC v. Vozary, “the list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed, facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, a recipe’s instructions, as functional directions, are statutorily excluded from copyright protection.”

https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

I would have thought the same reasoning would apply to software. I'm curious about how reasoning differs in that case.

I have to think part of it is also the pay structure of food bloggers being paid by the word.

I'm pretty sure recipes aren't copyrightable, even when they are attached to a story.

I'd assume it prevents legally scraping & copying the whole site, at the cost of a silly amount of human labor writing the fluff.

I just think they're part of the non-fiction fantasy genre of entertainment alongside cooking, travel, and house buying + renovating shows.

They're ostensibly informational, but 99% of people consuming them aren't genuinely looking to cook the thing, travel to the place, or buy and renovate a house.

Clearly an attempt to lure you in when you're hungry and searching for some common queries like history of famous places.

I’ve assumed it was to create a longer page which can hold more ads.

Recipes by themselves aren’t copyrightable. Bullshit stories are.

Does copyright for a story containing a recipe protect against use of the recipe outside the context of the story?

No, but it stops straight scraping, and requires a scraper to do a little bit more work to copy the recipe.

Not much extra work surely. Most recipes are on sites that use the same template for every recipe so it's pretty easy for a scraper to find the ingredients and method. The structure is usually even labelled with meaningful class names on the elements.

I think the question is “is it possible to split recipe from BS story programmatically”

Generally yes. Most recipe blogs use semantic markup so that Google recognizes it as a recipe, which also makes it easy to scrape programmatically.

No

Yes - it's not specifically that the recipe sites have changed to do this, but rather, that Google is preferring to show you sites that are doing this.