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Comment by Disposal8433 | Hacker News Reader

I have noticed that a lot. For example:

What is the price of the Switch 2?

The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>

Recipe for Foo. Foo has always been my favorite dish. I fondly remember all the times my grandma made this for me. My grandma, who was born on August 2, 1946, as the daughter of… (10 more pages of text) To cook Foo the way my grandma did, you first need some Bar. Bar is originally native to the reclusive country of… (20 more pages of text)

Yeah recipes are the worst. I least the acknowledge themselves and give you a “jump to recipe” button most of the time. I sometimes hit the print button and just use the preview screen too.

I don’t think recipes are much at actual fault here. It seems the fault of search engines preferring returning recipes with longer stories over just-the-recipe blogs or sites like AllRecipes. We humans just have to suffer as a result of the artificial selection of what the search engines wants for us to experience.

It's not just that: recipes on their own are, AIUI, not copyrightable.

https://cookingforengineers.com is giving 500s for me. Per the Wayback machine it was working as recently as last month. They do include background stories but they're much better about this sort of thing. (The old-school aspects of the page layout also help.)

Paprika (an app for storing recipes) can parse out the ingredient list and directions from a webpage. It's surprisingly good at it.

thank you for this! i'll check it out

You forgot 4 paragraphs text about how they went on a journey of self discovery, that lead to them spending time in the remote village of Y, learning the traditional methods of cooking the dish.

The dish in question is a ham sandwich.

I don't even know if the recipes themselves are real and tested any more or just slop.

It seems like it's more often than not that I'm coming across dishes that just do not make sense, or are poorly plagiarized by someone who doesn't understand the cuisine they're trying to replicate with absolute nonsense steps or substitutions or quantities. I used to have a great success rate when googling for recipes but now it's almost all crap, not even a mixed bag.

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