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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case.

Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut.

Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.

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The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed throughout the recipe does have copyright.

Nah, the stories are there so you have to scroll 6000 pages to finally find the actual recipe. Why do they want you to scroll? Because every 5th word is an advertisement. More scrolling, more ads, more revenue.

All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.

No, it's so the pages follow thr Google blessed "ideal" page format. X number of words, 2-3 pictures, iser stays on page for longer than Y time.

Last one is the killer, a site that quickly gives you the info you are looking (or quickly shows you it doesn't have the info) for is punished by google search ranking.

I thought it was so the site has longer to mine monero using your CPU while you scroll? Ever notice how incredibly slow any device gets when looking at recipes?

It's possible that the scrolling is giving the remote server time to use your CPU/GPU to mine some space cash, but it's also possible that attaching listeners to events that happen many times per second (such as scrolling, mouse movement) is common, especially if 3rd party ads are allowed to interact with the page, making it nearly impossible to know what those ads' scripts are doing.

Isn't that similar to what they tried for things like shopping for example, and they got sued for? The problem is that if they become an aggregator for a specific type of content, like let's say travel or lyrics, then other aggregator websites start suing.

Oh, I was not suggesting they be an aggregator. They should get people to produce original content and pay them per view like YouTube.

Shout out to https://onlyrecipe.app which allows you to extract just the recipe from SEO-corrupted ad-riddled websites.

"Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut."

I LOL'ed. Thank you for that.

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