[HN Gopher] Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app - Remove clutter from recipe...
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Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app - Remove clutter from recipe sites
Author : AwkwardPanda
Score : 443 points
Date : 2022-01-04 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (showcase.onlyrecipe.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (showcase.onlyrecipe.app)
| seabea wrote:
| Looks poorly tested. QR code scanner doesn't work and the "how to
| use?" tip doesn't display anything. Manually entering a url
| requires the user to include the subdomain AND http/https
| (instead of defaulting to "http://www".
| black_13 wrote:
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Oh shoot. I did not expect this huge a response. Any more load
| and my backend server is going to collapse.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| asow92 wrote:
| reminds me of https://www.paprikaapp.com/
| ziggus wrote:
| Agreed. Probably the best recipe app around, just for the
| built-in browser that lets you grab any recipe from a site. I
| think I've run into one instance of a site that it couldn't
| scrape, out of hundreds.
| asow92 wrote:
| Their web import feature, while not always perfect, does a good
| job of stripping these things out. And this service has
| synching between native apps on various platforms.
| haswell wrote:
| As a regular user of Paprika, I have to mention that it's a
| fantastic app, and any recipe I intend to make more than once
| gets imported.
| parkersweb wrote:
| Yeah - there's some really lovely touches to Paprika - like:
|
| - easily scale the recipe to make different quantities
|
| - convert units used to one you're more familiar with.
|
| - wherever the recipe says 'do x for 10 minutes' you can tap on
| the time and it'll allow you to set a timer for that one piece.
| Pete-Codes wrote:
| ha, I always have to navigate whimsical tales of Italian
| grandfathers etc to get to the actual recipe so this is a good
| idea
| js2 wrote:
| The comments on recipe sites are often useful. Things like: pre-
| heat your mason jars before pouring in the caramelized sugar or
| they'll crack. You can find clarifications, or things people have
| substituted, or just how a recipe has failed for some folks.
|
| There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten
| Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a
| few favorite cooking books: On Food and Cooking, Joy of Cooking,
| The Art of Simple Food. Then I have some speciality cooking books
| for desserts, ice creams, and soups.
|
| My wife transcribes recipes we really like to 4" x 6" index
| cards. The recipe box is up to probably about 200-300 recipes
| we've collected over our 25 years together.
|
| FWIW, on current iPadOS, Only Recipe isn't showing up in the
| Share menu for me.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Recipes I like go into a Google Drive shared folder for me,
| where I standardize format, add notes/tweaks, and share with
| friends/family who want 'em.
| hnrodey wrote:
| Aggregating to handwritten version is very nice. A recipe box
| is a terrific artifact to hand down through generations.
|
| Congrats.
| vestrigi wrote:
| Nice if you get the recipes right on the first time but
| tedious if you like to update recipes and add comments. At
| least for handwriting perfectionists.
| groby_b wrote:
| A handwritten recipe without annotations and butter stains
| is simply a recipe you don't like very much ;)
|
| Which, to me, means digital is a bad format - because I'm
| not going to annotate in my text editor while juggling
| three burners and the cake in the oven.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I agree the comments are often important. I also agree with
| your list of sources, and would add that the magazine Cook's
| Illustrated is nice.
|
| I think the reason that people are all upset about the spammy
| recipe sites is they are too cheap to pay anything for content,
| so they are stuck with the spammers. The easy solution is to
| just look at yourself and stop being such a cheapskate. Buy a
| recipe book. Buy a magazine. Subscribe to a newspaper.
| short12 wrote:
| Recipe websites are a prime example of everything that is wrong
| with the web today. The bulk collection websites are primarily
| crap but for the same reasons as the personal branded websites. A
| shit ton of junk around a sometimes worthwhile background story
| or such and then the recipe all with shit tons of junk
| interrupting and destroying any sense of continuity. Fuck their
| stupid ads
| hericium wrote:
| Web written for Googlebot, not humans.
| markstos wrote:
| Better: Use AnyList. It has a feature to import recipes. The
| result is that not only get to view a clean copy of a recipe, but
| a clean copy is stored in AnyList for easy reference later.
| njovin wrote:
| I'll second this recommendation. I started using Anylist last
| year and it's incredible. My weekly grocery flow goes like this
| now:
|
| - Skim a few recipe sites for anything new I want to try
|
| - 1-click import them to Anylist (using the browser extension)
|
| - Add recipes to the weekly meal plan in Anylist
|
| - Click "Add all ingredients" for each recipe, which
| automatically puts all ingredients for the recipe into my
| shopping list.
|
| One of my favorite things is that it automatically categorizes
| the list items by store section, making the shopping much
| easier.
|
| It doesn't work with every recipe site, though (traeger.com for
| example), but it works with most.
|
| There are two features I wish it had that would make it nearly
| perfect:
|
| 1. Ability to create my own categorization rules. For example,
| "whole peeled tomatoes with their juices" gets categorized as
| beverage, and I can manually recategorize that specific item,
| but it would be nice to create a rule for whole _peeled_
| tomato* that puts it in the "Canned Goods" category
|
| 2. The ability to exclude ingredients from being added to the
| list. I always have salt, pepper, and olive oil on hand, but I
| end up having to manually cross a dozen of those off my
| shopping list when I add ingredients for the week when nearly
| every recipe inevitably includes them.
| leifg wrote:
| I use a similar recipe manager on my phone (paprika 3 but also
| playing around with Mela). They come with an integrated browser
| to download the recipes.
|
| Not only do they did rid of the novel about the ingredients and
| their origins, they also get around most paywalls.
|
| The thing that would make me instantly switch to any other
| manager is an app that would parse recipes from the various
| YouTube and TikTok videos. If you follow the right accounts these
| videos are a gold mine.
| mirthturtle wrote:
| Someone tried this a while back and it didn't go so well:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/03/02/recipeasly-fo...
| metabagel wrote:
| This is an app, though, not a website. If I understand
| correctly, it's just parsing the page for you.
|
| Edit: Oh, there is also a website.
| gamerDude wrote:
| Maybe keep ads so that the bloggers can keep their current
| revenue stream. As someone who loves this idea, all I care
| about is easy access to the recipe. Its ok with me to have not
| too intrusive ads.
| gamerDude wrote:
| Or just move the recipe to the top and keep all the other
| content/ads below.
| artursapek wrote:
| That guy had absolutely no conviction once he started getting
| called out. He did a complete 180 in the weakest way.
| [deleted]
| toyg wrote:
| The site is back up, although it now seems to contain
| exclusively "free" recipes (i.e. coming from CC sites and old
| books).
|
| IMHO there are ways to make recipe-scraping resistant to
| copyright claims.
|
| 1. hide all scraping actions behind a login page; that makes
| content private, hence uninfringing.
|
| 2. every time a user "publishes" or shares content, present
| only an extract of the recipe, like the ingredients and first
| few steps; expanding the extract sends you to the original site
| (ideally to the specific anchor of the procedure).
| kixiQu wrote:
| > private, hence uninfringing
|
| let me know how this goes for private torrent tracker sites
| Hard_Space wrote:
| From the WP article:
|
| _But it's even more complex than that. The stories are
| personal. They're cultural. They're often told from the
| perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have
| created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The
| recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the
| creators that their stories have no value. It's the same
| message America has told immigrants and women for centuries,
| now just in electronic form._
|
| I think that may be taking it too far, particularly since
| Google effectively created this entire syndrome.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| > It's the same message America has told immigrants and women
| for centuries
|
| I certainly won't deny this point conceptually, but it
| assumes that the stories are even true in the first place.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I've got to be honest: those stories hold no value to me.
| That's the truth. I don't know why the WaPo wants those us
| who are like me to pretend otherwise.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's weird how you go from "to me" to "wants us." Surely
| you can imagine that people might be interested in history
| and stories around food.
|
| I personally don't give a shit about mathematicians and
| scientists personal lives, but I don't have a problem
| imagining those who do. I think the numbers say it all.
| Others think that the examination of every detail of the
| person who wrote the numbers first might give them some
| insight into how to create more numbers.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_algorithm#Newton%E
| 2%8... is interesting but I wouldn't want Google Sheets
| to display it in a modal every time I hit the "/" key. A
| recipe needs a very high signal:noise ratio when it's
| going to be followed in real time while food is cooking.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| That's why it's all in one place on the screen at the
| bottom of the post, so that when you have decided you
| should cook it, you can just leave it there to look at.
| renewiltord wrote:
| In my experience, traditional English usage there would
| use context to replace "us" with "those of us like me".
| But since clearly that is not the case, I have replaced
| it so it is no longer 'weird' to you.
|
| I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you polled
| recipe searchers, the vast majority (>66%) would say that
| they don't want the story. In fact, I'll back that. If
| you're in San Francisco, I will bet $1000 against your
| $1000 that this will be the case and we can equally bear
| the price of running this. An associate will contact you
| if you're up for it.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Bloggers who are putting care into their work typically
| write more for the people who follow them than for the
| randos who drop in from a Google search. What do people
| who subscribe to foodie Patreons care about? The people
| who have a list of bookmarked recipe blogs? What about
| people coming from Instagram posts who are drawn in by a
| beautiful photo, what are they hoping to see? Why are we
| establishing a framing that the people who should be most
| catered to are the people who care the least about the
| cook and their work?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I don't think we are establishing a framing where the
| randos (folks like me) are of prime importance - merely
| establishing a framework where they exist. The WaPo piece
| speaks against recipe aggregators who simply strip the
| recipe down to ingredients and algorithm. i.e. I am
| fairly comfortable with recipe websites writing long-
| winded stories for _their_ audience while alternative
| apps strip those down to ingredients and algorithm. It
| appears that the WaPo writer opposes the existence of the
| latter.
|
| The story writers don't have to write for randos, but I
| (a rando) rather enjoy the stripping tool. So I think I'm
| going to install OnlyRecipe.app and if OR's author is
| pressured by WaPo-like folks to shut down, I'll probably
| write my own since parsing that schema is trivial.
|
| And I have a day job in HFT so I can't be shut down.
| After all, no one can boycott me or my products.
| kixiQu wrote:
| > while alternative apps strip those down to ingredients
| and algorithm.
|
| So what you want is for recipe developers to have their
| work scraped, stripped, and presented outside of its
| intended creative context and _revenue generation
| mechanism,_ and while other people may think this is
| unethical, they can 't stop you so that makes it fine.
| renewiltord wrote:
| No. What makes it fine is that the user agent is my tool
| to read content that servers send me so it is free to
| display or not display sections of the content using
| whatever formatting I desire.
| criddell wrote:
| If Google changed their algorithm to rank recipe sites by
| efficiency (ie less narrative is rewarded), I bet the
| recipe developers would change their sites overnight. I
| suspect the main audience for the stories is the
| GoogleBot.
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| I agree with this. These app don't take anything from the
| experience of people who want to read these asinine
| stories -- it just helps the folks that are there for the
| ingredients.
|
| If this gets shut down I would love if a general, open-
| source solution could be developed to spread the
| capability. A generic Python recipe parser that anyone
| could hook up to a front-end. If the apps proliferate at
| a high enough rate they can't all be shut down.
| computershit wrote:
| Same. If you're only telling the story to fill time then
| write a blog post, keep it separate from the recipe.
| fleddr wrote:
| The complexity is imagined. It's not complex at all. People
| using Google for a free recipe are looking for...the recipe.
| If they were looking for stories from immigrants, they would
| have googled that.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I don't think it is taking it too far honestly. Even if it
| can be a bit jarring to see it written out like that. Part of
| trying food from other cultures/countries/families is getting
| to see how their history is reflected in the food they
| prepare. I read cookbooks to get a feel for a place, even if
| I don't plan to cook everything in the book. Or more
| correctly couldn't.
|
| For example I enjoy pad Thai, but I didn't know it was
| created by the Thai government in the 1930s until I saw a
| small comment and did some reading. https://www.theatlantic.c
| om/international/archive/2014/04/no...
|
| Or the history of Lebanese immigration into Mexico that led
| to Al Pastor. https://theeyehuatulco.com/2020/07/29/al-
| pastor-and-the-leba...
| m4rc3lv wrote:
| Works on a lot of sites, nice job. I can't pull recipes from
| McDougall. https://www.drmcdougall.com/recipes/white-beans-
| mexicali/
| amelius wrote:
| Isn't this what "Reader Mode" is for?
| switzer wrote:
| Since OnlyRecipe.app is already parsing the recipe site, it would
| be a great feature to allow conversion to weights from volume
| (e.g. show 120g of flour vs. 1c of flour). Also, allow someone to
| double (or 1.5x...) the recipe as well, and have all measures
| double in the recipe!
| dagurp wrote:
| A choice between metric and imperial would be nice too
| joshstrange wrote:
| You might be interested in Paprika, it can import recipes from
| anywhere, let you edit/save them, and scale. It's got a ton
| more features than just that but it's a great app and worth
| every penny.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Agreed, happy user of Paprika here. It also has multi-device
| syncing, so my wife and I have a common place for them. We
| both cook quite a lot. Found Paprkia via HN comments 2-4
| years ago. It is paid, and there's a Mac laptop app that is
| an extra charge. Around they holidays they usually have a
| sale, but I think it was ~$10 for both my wife and I to get.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Please just parse recipes and do it well. I can convert it
| myself and you cannot convert volume to weight reliably unless
| you index specific ingredients (brand, flour type, seive) to
| their volumetric weight.
|
| FTR: I hate volume measured recipes that include flour. "1 cup
| of flour"...hmm, what does that mean? Guess I'm about to find
| out.
|
| I generally assume it means to sift the flour into a cup but
| that is not always the case. Some recipes do not specify, and
| some do. It's a roll of the dice which is the recipe writers
| default for "1 cup of flour." Some recipes count on you gouging
| out a packed cup and some assume you should be sifting.
| Professionals weigh their flour.
|
| The last thing this app should be doing is trying to figure all
| this out. Impossible.
|
| I have seen it tried in other services and the feature just got
| in the way or ruined the recipe.
| switzer wrote:
| But.. that's what I want! e.g. 1C flour = 120g, 1C sugar =
| 200g. If you parse the recipe, it cannot be that hard to do a
| conversion based on ingredient, and such a value add!
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I'll see if that conversion can be
| done in a generic way.
| hellweaver666 wrote:
| As a metric user, imperial format recipes are the bane of my
| existence. I swear to god some Americans don't realise the
| rest of the world uses a whole other system.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I put "UK" in most English recipe searches where it might
| matter.
|
| The recipe itself is likely to be a bit less sweet, and my
| ingredients (purchased in Denmark) are also closer to those
| sold in Britain than the American versions. Things like
| types of cream, lack of sugar added to slightly-processed
| ingredients etc.
| adwww wrote:
| I've acquired three types of table spoon in my kitchen
| drawer. The largest is nearly double the smallest. It's
| absurd that this is an actual unit of measure.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Assuming we're talking about measuring spoons (since
| table cutlery can be any volume, according to the
| design), I first wrote "a metric tablespoon measure is
| 15mL exactly, by definition." The US one is almost the
| same, and Australia is weird with 20mL.
|
| But now I see Germany changed the definition at some
| point, and a 15mL spoon is an Alter Essloffel, with a
| Moderner Essloffel being 7.5mL. Can a German confirm
| this, or clarify which is used in practise?
|
| The other European countries I've checked use 15mL (if
| they use the measure at all).
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essbesteck#Verwendung_als_M
| a.C...
| infini8 wrote:
| Imperial system just seems so illogical and unscientific.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Yeah, and what's up with all this non-English content on
| the internet? Don't they know that it's the most spoken
| language? A lot of it isn't even in Chinese, either! Ruins
| my day when I come across something written in German
| geocar wrote:
| I was taught to bake (and write recipes) using a mixture of
| units; to prefer metric measurements when precision is
| required, but to prefer "American" units when it isn't,
| almost to highlight the absence of precision, and to clue the
| reader that they may have to adjust for humidity or the
| amount of gluten generated (or whatever).
|
| I know this stuff is obvious to an experienced cook, but I
| can also imagine seeing 14,2g of anything causing some
| unnecessary distress when trying to work with an unfamiliar
| recipe.
|
| Maybe something like "1c of flour (approx. 120g)" is a good
| way to be safe?
|
| If you're looking for an engine for actually _doing_ the
| conversions, there 's GNU units[1] and Frink[2] which both
| contain databases of these conversions you may be able to
| mine.
|
| [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/units/
|
| [2]: https://frinklang.org/
| Symbiote wrote:
| I have friends who sometimes help me cook a dinner for more
| friends. I've seen some of them try to measure out 22.5mL1
| of olive oil for frying because I pressed a button on the
| site to 1.5x the recipe...
|
| Recipe websites don't include that first 10 pages of a
| "beginner" recipe book, which usually describes how to
| measure ingredients and the various cooking techniques
| used.
|
| 1 1.5 metric tablespoons, 1.5 x 15mL.
| [deleted]
| thepratt wrote:
| Being able to tell if it's a US or non-US cup for conversions
| is something that would be great too. I first look for
| grams/oz/other as units, then fall back to primary intended
| audience/publisher being American or not.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I've all but stopped getting recipes from websites. It always
| feels like every recipe I find was either just copied from some
| other site with one ingredient changed, or there's some brand
| sponsored ingredient shoehorned in. A lot of modern recipe books
| aren't much better, but there's maybe a little more useful info.
|
| The main thing I've done to find decent recipes these days is to
| check youtube. Not stuff like 5 minute crafts or overproduced
| tiktok recipe "hacks", but videos by people cooking in their own
| kitchen, mostly in real time, talking about what they're doing
| and why. You can see the whole process and see their technique
| and be reasonably certain that they know what they're doing on
| some level.
|
| Here's a few people I always come back to in case anyone is
| interested:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNrkDzpgSFY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dSeHP14Osc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyop7-v3Es
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVolu2pxveo
| thrower123 wrote:
| Most recipe sites are less terrible if you click the "Print
| Recipe" button, for example:
|
| https://goodcheapeats.com/simple-rice-pilaf/
|
| versus:
|
| https://goodcheapeats.com/wprm_print/27621
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail,
| follows this same horrible pattern?
|
| I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in
| Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed
| by, finally, the actual recipe?
|
| My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like
| having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the
| recipe"? etc?
|
| Second question - anyone who has searched for recipes also knows
| that Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page
| and show it alongside the results. Which is obviously meaningless
| because comparing 4.5 stars from grandmas-cooking.net to 4.5
| stars from foodnetwork.com is apples-to-oranges. So what's to
| stop me from simply faking my own star system, then presenting it
| on my website so that google picks it up in its results? And what
| triggers Google to look for a star rating? Could I update my tech
| blog to have a star rating and Google will show it? Or is it
| limited to keywords like "recipe"?
| avaika wrote:
| It's not just recipes. There are tones of questions I often
| search which have a very specific and short answer. E.g. "how
| many kangaroos are there in the world?".
|
| Ideally I would expect a page with my question and a number
| with link to the source. However in the real world I get
| various pages with somehow related title and tons of text
| inside I don't need. Often times without the exact number I'm
| looking for.
|
| I guess that most likely nobody wants to maintain such a
| resource since it might be hard to make it profitable. Still it
| might save a lot of time for collective humanity.
| yhorawu8 wrote:
| johnfn wrote:
| Google weights time spent on site in rankings. If you bounce
| instantly back to the search results, obviously you didn't find
| what you were looking for. If you stay for a while, maybe you
| did.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| Ratings for recipes never make sense anyway because if one
| reads the reviews they're always of the sort, "I LOVE THIS
| RECIPE! I used buttermilk instead of Milk, doubled the sugar,
| used almond extract instead of vanilla. This recipe is
| AMAZING!"
| bluGill wrote:
| Those reviews are more useful that the recipes. If I am
| missing one ingredient I have more confidence in trying a
| substitute if someone else has before me (I've messed a few
| recipes up with a bad substitute). sometimes I'll look at the
| substitution and think that sounds better even though I have
| everything for the original (if I've made this before I'm
| more likely to do this for variety).
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| The problem is once you change the ingredients, you're not
| making the same recipe. Sure the alternatives may turn out
| better, but rate the original a 1 star and then list what
| changes you made.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why would I rate the original 1 star? I didn't make it so
| I have no knowledge about it, or I like it and I like
| this modifications.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Its annoying to me too. A lot of fluff. From what I remember,
| back around 2012, Google was facing a serious issue of content
| farms appearing in their results. These are sites that
| aggregate data and auto-generate articles about a myriad of
| topics. They were ruining search. So Google introduced a
| significant change to the way that they rank websites. They
| figured originality and authenticity was the key to identifying
| genuine sites. And how was this determined? Well, an article is
| written, it should contain a lot of text, more so and of better
| quality than an algorithm could write. And the content had to
| be original. If it was clear that the content was copy and
| pasted from somewhere else, then it was probably not original.
| So here we are, where a simple recipe has to tell the person's
| life story in order differentiate it from the junk of content
| farms. I am sure someone here remembers this Google change back
| then. It had a specific name. Everyone on the web who was
| concerned about SEO at the time was aware of it.
| _ttg wrote:
| It's Google SEO, as others have pointed out. A pretty
| insightful look into the incentives in this article -
| https://www.protocol.com/tech-vs-food-bloggers
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in
| Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed
| by, finally, the actual recipe?_
|
| As a child growing up outside of Atlanta, this is how we were
| typically taught recipes.
|
| "One day, when you're sharing this recipe on a mass
| communication network that doesn't exist today, make sure to
| (1) mention that you're from Atlanta & (2) include a story
| about your children / partner / family."
|
| I guess, maybe it's different elsewhere?
| Rygian wrote:
| The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue
| [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not
| scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also
| non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright
| law.
|
| [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
| walligatorrr wrote:
| Interesting but this app doesn't seem to be having a hard
| time scraping and publishing the recipe material without
| copyright.
| pfranz wrote:
| I _always_ see this as a stated reason, but I 'm skeptical
| unless it's cargo-culting like "no copyright intended" on
| YouTube videos (but this is _a lot_ more work). I can 't see
| Adam and Joanne [1] or Holly [2] suing for copyright because
| when someone stole their Frito Pie recipe and left off the
| story at top. Especially, when they both have Google-defined
| tags to grab only the recipe and ingredients. As others have
| mentioned, the bigger sites (Allrecipes, food network,
| NYTimes, binging with babish etc.) tend not do the story
| thing.
|
| Do you have any other info on copyright as a reason?
|
| [1] https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-
| hummus-r...
|
| [2] https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/
|
| [3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/struct
| ure...
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at
| least _databases_ - even if they solely consist of trivial,
| non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was
| put into place after a company in Germany just hired people
| to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages,
| and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't
| copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least
| now).
| anamax wrote:
| In the US, the facts in a phone book (names, numbers,
| addresses) are not copyrightable and neither is the
| collection. However, see the bit at the end about
| compilations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._
| R....
|
| I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers,
| addresses) are copyrightable. If they are, they can be used
| to give copyright protection to a collection even when the
| bulk of the collection isn't copyrightable.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Those fake facts are a thing and have a name [0], they
| are placed into phonebooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias
| etc. to detect copyright violations (i.e. somebody else
| stealing your compilation).
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
| whiddershins wrote:
| And maps.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers,
| addresses) are copyrightable.
|
| This has, unfortunately, been upheld on occasion. True
| damages from copying such false entries would be
| nonexistent, naturally, but statutory damages are blind
| to such trivialities as justice or proportionality.
|
| Morally speaking, anything _presented_ as fact (including
| entries in a phone book or notations on a map) should be
| _treated_ as fact and thus not copyrightable. Something
| along the lines of estoppel should prevent one from
| claiming that they are providing a database of facts and
| then suing the recipient for reproducing copyrightable
| "creative elements" which don't belong there. Also,
| selling someone a database of "facts" with deliberate
| fictitious entries mixed in which are not specifically
| labeled as such should be classified as fraud and open
| the publisher up to liability should anyone suffer the
| slightest harm due to the false entries.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| That's not copyright but a separate database right with
| different rules.
| bloak wrote:
| I think there are two separate things here:
|
| * database rights, which are similar to but distinct from
| copyright; in particular they last for only 15 years;
|
| * copyright in a particular collection of public-domain
| things.
|
| Case C-304/07 Directmedia Publishing GmbH v Albert-Ludwigs-
| Universitat Freiburg, which was about an anthology of
| poems, seems to have involved both things. See if you can
| make sense of it because I'm not sure I can!
| servercobra wrote:
| People scroll more, so higher engagement and lower bounce rate
| metrics with the site (which I think helps with search ranking)
| seanhunter wrote:
| My understanding is there are 3 reasons. 1)The authors want to
| build a brand for themselves rather than just provide you with
| recipes. This helps to get further opportunities for them and
| differentiates their cookbook/site from others in a very
| crowded market 2)A lot of people read cookbooks as books rather
| than just when they are cooking and this philosophy seems to
| have been copied over to recipe sites 3)Copyright. Istr reading
| somewhere you can't copyright a recipe whereas you can pursue a
| claim against someone who plagiarises the non-obvious text
| parts. It's something like that.
| technothrasher wrote:
| The "listing of ingredients" and "simple set of directions"
| are not copyrightable in the US (I have no idea about other
| countries). Photographs, drawings, and background info such
| as explanations of how or why the recipe works may all be
| copyrightable though.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
| elwell wrote:
| > Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page
| and show it alongside the results
|
| Recipe Schema:
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
|
| Yes, you can totally fake the # of stars & rating.
| giaour wrote:
| > I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in
| Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed
| by, finally, the actual recipe?
|
| > My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really
| like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple
| "here's the recipe"? etc?
|
| Cookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text
| for every recipe. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe
| unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the
| intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes
| critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to
| make it. The only cookbook I own that _doesn 't_ have intro
| text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the
| authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with
| the terms and techniques used.
|
| OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated
| the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those
| authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional
| cookbooks. Contemporary food blogs tend to try to emulate
| older, successful blogs (maybe because Google somehow boosted
| recipes with intro text back when such text was usually
| helpful?) but mostly come off as AI-generated garbage text,
| made just long enough to create a couple scroll events and
| artificially lower a site's bounce rate.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| 1. SEO. I've been recommended to have a ghostwriter write
| technical articles for me to increase my client base. Build
| enough of a cult following and you can be sure that your
| youtube channel, or next book has enough of an audience.
|
| 2. I think it also appeals to a certain audience. It makes them
| feel open minded to other cultures. There's an emotional bond
| forming with the story or the people in the story.
|
| Don't forget that the average american speaks only one
| language, yet considers themselves as part of the country that
| is creating/keeping world peace and that at the same time the
| average american consumer spends more on average on consumer
| goods per capita than any other nation in the world. Add to
| that, that ad revenue is the US is also disproportionately
| higher than anywhere else.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| I have literally never met anyone express (2). Any time
| anyone needs a recipe site they immediately start complaining
| about it, unprompted.
| vshade wrote:
| I sometimes like to read the paragraphs to know why some
| things are done and possible substitutions, specially if
| I'm not going to make the recipe immediately. But when I
| want to make it, I really would love to have it separated
| from the text.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Smitten Kitchen often has a few paragraphs before the
| recipe. I don't _always_ read it, but I also don 't hate
| it.
|
| It helps she writes well and it seems to genuinely reflect
| the author's life--I think it started out as a personal
| blog with occasional recipes before becoming a recipe site
| with bloggy bits bolted on. The text is also fairly
| helpful, in that it sometimes describes less successful
| attempts cooking the same thing, or compares it with other
| dishes ("If you hate X, try [this] instead").
|
| This may be a rare exception though--I agree that a lot of
| other recipe sites have tons of vacuous filler.
| giaour wrote:
| Smitten Kitchen was one of the OG food blogs that
| established the pattern that recipe spam websites are
| trying to emulate. Back in the aughts, searching for a
| recipe on Google _was_ useful because they would
| prioritize "enriched" sites like Smitten Kitchen, David
| Lebovitz's blog, Orangette, The Wednesday Chef, etc.,
| where the narrative portion of the recipe primarily
| established who the recipe would appeal to, tips on
| unusual techniques employed in the recipe, and sometimes
| a humanizing anecdote or two.
|
| The format of Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz's blog
| have remained unchanged for about 15 years, probably
| because those authors used the success of their blogs to
| establish related revenue streams (mostly via bestselling
| cookbooks). I would be surprised if the blogs themselves
| still make much money, given how few display ads are
| included on each page.
| MartinCron wrote:
| My wife and I collect cookbooks and cocktail recipe books.
| There are a handful of writers who have a compelling voice
| where I read more than just the ingredient list and
| instructions.
|
| But for some random blog that I find while googling? Never.
| floatrock wrote:
| Because "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which
| google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows
| presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the
| rich media carousel previews, etc.
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
|
| If you want to know what categories of things will have
| especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results,
| look at the other things that google encourages developers to
| semantically tag and compete for use of the shiny results page
| features. A couple interesting ones: Ecommerce
| (monetizable sales): - Books - Review snippet
| - Software app - Events Google Maps data
| ingestion: - Local Business Youtube
| previews: - Video - Movie Job search:
| - Employer Aggregate Rating - Estimated salary -
| Job Posting Knowledge graph: - COVID-19
| announcements (ooo, topical!) - Dataset - FAQ
| - Fact Check
|
| Recipes are something that people who search for recipes do
| several times a week, so the algorithms identified this as a
| Thing with High DAU's. Semantic tags then makes it easier to
| identify "this is a recipe page", but that means for such a
| crowded category it's a race to the bottom with optimization
| and ad-stuffing (more life story == more inline ad blocks).
|
| Unfortunately, it's against google's interest to promote to-
| the-point recipe pages that have fewer embedded AdWords blocks.
|
| Projects like OP probably just parse out the semantic tags and
| throw away the rest of the content. This could easily be a
| browser extension.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to
| test:
|
| "pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent:
| https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/
|
| "lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good:
| https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/
|
| "sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point
| https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/
|
| Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads you
| see and I can't judge the quality as well, buy at least the
| sites are quite usable. I'd be more pissed off by a missing
| ingredient than having to scroll a screen or two.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| The lasagne recipe page would be one I count as bad.
| There's a lot of useless text before the recipe. The other
| two result pages are good.
|
| Interesting enough, the big name recipe sites: Allrecipes,
| food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc. all are
| short and to the point. But for some reason the crappy
| recipe sites outperform them on Google.
| creato wrote:
| NYT recipes are almost always in the top 3 results for
| me, I don't think they are being outperformed that much
| if at all.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I don't know how to make it, a list of ingredients
| wouldn't help me much. That article is a bit too
| superficial for me.
|
| Actually, video recipes are the best imho:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/yousuckatcooking :)
| schnevets wrote:
| The Lasagna recipe is an independent cooking blogger
| (note the "Hi there, I'm Holly!" in the top-right
| corner). Food Network, Allrecipes, Tegel, and other sites
| mentioned are not promoting a specific person, but an
| entire brand. Babish is the exception to this rule, but
| he "changed the game" by going for YouTube instead of
| blogs.
|
| Although the optimization is infuriating, in my search to
| become a decent cook, I have found more success following
| specific writers instead of a top result/highest rated
| meal. Many of these writers self-promote (and cross-
| promote) on sites with the same template as
| spendwithpennies.com
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if that annoying SEO template was
| designed in collaboration with Cookbook publishers. The
| "anecdote before recipe" style was made famous in Irma S.
| Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, and took on a variety of forms
| throughout the 20th century.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| > Babish is the exception to this rule, but he "changed
| the game" by going for YouTube instead of blogs.
|
| I think this (or a hybrid approach) was already a thing.
| See Food Wishes (Chef John), which has been using a
| similar model for a while.
| srcreigh wrote:
| The "Jump To Recipe" button on the Lasagna page took to
| straight to the ingredients
| dwighttk wrote:
| > Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads
| you see
|
| Be careful. I also have an ad blocker and sent a fun link
| to my mom a friend had sent me and she saw Alllllllllll the
| ads. It was not a fun link for her. Didn't even think of it
| before sending.
| wilde wrote:
| I wonder if it has to do with the type of food. "Hummus
| recipe" gets you the entire history of chickpeas:
| https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-
| hummus-r...
| allochthon wrote:
| This is the kind of recipe I see most often when
| searching for recipes. I wonder whether GP was a little
| lucky with his/her three links. (The lasagna recipe was
| an example of an SEO'd recipe.)
| cguess wrote:
| There's a new one coming for a Media Fact Check as well.
| https://schema.org/MediaReview
| msielski wrote:
| There are browser extensions which do this: -
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-
| filter... - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-
| filter/ahlc...
| cvg wrote:
| This is interesting. Looks like the app might be just parsing
| this schema from the webpage and adding a nice ui.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Exactly. I've never been as frustrated with the modern web as I
| am when I try to find a recipe. It's the most infuriating
| experience. I'd pay money if I knew I could access a very large
| database of recipes, where I know I just get the recipe itself.
| guynamedloren wrote:
| It's an infuriating experience indeed. I reached my breaking
| point a few months ago, and decided I was just done with
| googling recipes. After trying a few different highly
| regarded paid apps (recipe managers, NYT Cooking) and not
| finding quite what I was looking for, I caved and started
| compiling my own recipe database in Notion. My goal is to use
| this database exclusively for weekly meal planning, as well
| as for cooking up something on a whim. It's a habit change
| for sure, and required a bit of upfront work to seed the
| database, but so far, has proved to be successful. Overall,
| both meal planning and cooking itself have become more
| enjoyable!
| nerdjon wrote:
| My best possible guesses (note, not really based on any
| research into it but just theories).
|
| - The ones that I have noticed do this, also tend to have a lot
| of ads. So maybe to both be able to show more ads (there is a
| limit of how many ads you can show if you just have a simple
| recipe, but add a book above it and you can show many more).
| Maybe also the ability to add referral links to talked about
| products?
|
| - It seems like some of them are trying to build a community.
| They do the whole "tell me about your experience" thing that
| only generates more page views and "interaction". So maybe
| there are people that actually follow these blogs and feel like
| all of that story is personal?
|
| - I am sure there is some SEO stuff going on here like others
| have said.
| shoulderfake wrote:
| Man I was wondering this same thing. Every single stupid recipe
| site is just terrible ux. Just show the recipe we don't care
| about the story.
| password1 wrote:
| It's SEO. Once a SEO expert was showing me user heatmaps on his
| popular website's articles. The users completely ignored 90% of
| the content and of the text of a page. I asked him why so many
| parts of the text were ignored by the users and his answer was
| "oh, that text is not for the users, it's for google". The
| literally paid writers to write articles way longer than needed
| solely to satisfy Google algorithms. The worst part is that it
| worked and they earned a lot of money from it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yet another reason the search monopoly we find ourselves in
| is so harmful. If there were even 2 or 3 search engines with
| substantial (20%+) market share SEO would have to try to
| triangulate for multiple competing measures of page quality -
| hopefully landing on something that resembles a passable user
| experience. Instead everyone in SEO is laser-focused on the
| singular quirks of Google's Page Rank.
| charlietango wrote:
| I do front-end dev for a high-volume recipe site and our
| multivariate tests mostly confirm the opposite. Simpler pages
| rank higher (and users report higher satisfaction with the
| product). Core Web Vitals changed the way a lot of things
| work, how long ago were you given this advice?
| password1 wrote:
| A while back (two years?). The thing is, user were
| extremely satisfied by the product. The users came to the
| website for a comparison table (which was at the top), used
| the information, clicked a link on the table and then
| exited the website. The rest of the page was useless, most
| won't even scroll. But still they needed it for a ton of
| SEO reasons (keyword density, semantic structure and
| complexity, internal and external linking). The company was
| working on an extremely competitive niche and it was
| crushing it (multi-million dollar ad revenue), so I think
| they knew what were doing.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder how Google would respond to a site that had a big
| arrow pointing to that text with a "This is just to quiet
| google. Click here to jump the the recipe."
| password1 wrote:
| I think it would get reported by your competitors and then
| blacklisted/penalized after manual review.
| gamerDude wrote:
| If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at
| the top and the story below?
| hysan wrote:
| Placing recipes on the bottom and behind "click to show"
| type features forces users to remain on your site for a
| longer period of time. This makes it appear to Google that
| users are more "engaged" on your website because it takes
| longer for them to bounce in the cases where the recipe
| isn't what they are looking for.
| csa wrote:
| > If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe
| at the top and the story below?
|
| From an SEO perspective, yes.
|
| Time spent on page will be less if the recipe is on the
| top.
| shoulderfake wrote:
| Such bs. I rarely spend more than 20s on a recipe page
| anyways. I scroll quickly to find ingredients box and
| thats it. Done...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| At this level of optimization even the 0.25s spent
| scrolling past a story is enough to make a difference...
| this is like "competitive swimmers shaving off their body
| hair" level SEO.
| rovr138 wrote:
| ...How do you follow the recipe? Or are we talking simple
| recipes where the steps are simple?
| technothrasher wrote:
| For me, at least, I typically don't follow the recipe.
| Very rarely am I looking for cooking instruction. I'm
| familiar enough with most typical cooking techniques that
| ingredient list and proportions, plus sometimes a quick
| glance at the steps, is all I need to get the job done.
| I'm usually modifying the ingredients on the fly as I
| cook the dish anyway.
|
| When I _am_ looking for cooking instruction, I find my
| existing library of trusted cookbooks to have a much
| better signal to noise ratio than Googled recipes sites
| on the web.
| sseagull wrote:
| I wish there were some "intermediate" websites for
| cooking. There seems to be a missing middle, where I
| don't know exactly to do, but know enough basics to only
| meed a little bit of direction.
|
| Ie, not step by step, but more general. Let me improvise,
| but still guide me.
| heliodor wrote:
| A better measure as to whether the user found what they
| were looking for would be if Google checked if the user
| continues browsing through subsequent search results or
| not.
| hedgewitch wrote:
| Yes. I worked at a site that had an SEO-obsessed boss and
| basically the keywords, placement of keywords, formatting
| of the page, everything...all affected SEO.
|
| However, that all likely paled in comparison to him gaming
| the system by paying to host separate sites that linked
| back to his in an effort to boost legitimacy during the
| times when SEO was a make or break thing.
| password1 wrote:
| That only covers backlinks and authority, it's just one
| piece of the puzzle. Ironically, that's called a "black-
| hat" way of obtaining backlinks and authority. The
| "white-hat" way is to go to legit websites and purchase
| links, literally pay them to link your website. This is a
| great example of what's considered "ethical" in SEO
| seanw444 wrote:
| The more I read about SEO, the more dystopian it sounds.
|
| "Please, I'll write whatever you want. Just list me!"
| allochthon wrote:
| It's definitely an arms race. Sort of like tax avoidance.
| As long as you have search engines ordering results, I
| guess you'll have people who seek to game the results.
| The question for me is whether what Google does can be
| improved upon. I think we can do much better.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| And as a result google search in general has been going
| downhill for the last 5 years. It's getting so bad, that I've
| openly been trying other search engines. Unfurtunately,
| duckduckgo has the same problem. I'm keeping an eye out for
| other search engines to do most of my searches.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > The worst part is that it worked and they earned a lot of
| money from it.
|
| This is the crux of the answer. The reason why recipe sites
| are full of garbage? Because it is effective and profitable.
| MadeThisToReply wrote:
| This is also the reason why most food is full of garbage.
| zhte415 wrote:
| I also see similar WordPress themes appear on supposedly
| independent sites with individual authors. Similar down to the
| email sign-up popups.
|
| I get that some WP themes are more popular than the bazillion
| available, but the consistency in look and feel between a
| Malaysian immigrant to New York cooking curries I know aren't
| that Malaysian and a stay at home mom in Ohio doing baking that
| may have been passed down by a great aunt that tweaked a King
| Arthur Flour recipe is often remarkable.
| kixiQu wrote:
| If you don't feel comfortable/confident getting into the
| code/markup to customize, you're probably going to pick
| something that looks "right" to you, which is then determined
| by what you see. Doesn't seem super remarkable to me?
| bluGill wrote:
| I've learned to only click on allrecipes.com all the others
| make it too hard to find the recipe I'm looking for. Please
| join me in rewarding the one good site that works. (note, the
| parent company was bought out this summer, the new owners may
| screw things up, if so punish them like all the others where
| you can't find the recipe)
| jordansmith wrote:
| They goal of a recipe website is to get ad revenue.
|
| Top tier ad networks won't accept your site if it's just
| straight up recipes so you need to have the padding to get
| approved.
|
| And it increases the amount of ads you can squeeze onto the
| page for higher RPMs
| adwww wrote:
| Anyone know why this life story rubbish seems particularly acute
| on recipe websites?
|
| I get the authors are doing it to boost Google rankings. But why
| do I only see it on cooking blogs, and not on blogs about
| cycling, DIY, programming, urbanism, whatever else I'm
| searching....
|
| Not many tech blogs start with a 4 page life history before
| showing me the code snippet I'm looking for.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| think of how niche Rust is compared to Apple Pie
| jenscow wrote:
| Personally, I long for the Rust which I used to smell coming
| from my grandma's kitchen when we used to visit on Sundays.
|
| Unfortunately, she's no longer with us. However, her Rust
| continues to be a part of our lives.
|
| The Rust you buy from shops today just isn't the same.
| figbert wrote:
| You simply must try https://www.mysaffronapp.com
|
| It really successfully imports and de-clutters recipes from any
| and all recipe sites I've thrown at it. Ben Awad, the programmer
| behind Saffron, actually posted about their scraping technique on
| HN to significant success: https://www.benawad.com/scraping-
| recipe-websites/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142220)
|
| Their UX is unmatched, they've got apps for iOS and Android in
| addition to the web app itself. Undoubtedly one of my favorite
| pieces of software.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| I really like the concept so I gave your PWA a try. The first
| recipe I tried[1] did not work as the app said it was unable to
| find a recipe. The wording also went down past the bottom of the
| screen, but I was unable to scroll to see the rest of the text. I
| used the "Desktop site" option my browser has and then was able
| to read the full message.
|
| [1]: https://www.food.com/recipe/homemade-curry-powder-38702
| laurentlbm wrote:
| Thank you, I hate blog-post-type recipes! Do you plan on adding a
| dark mode?
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Yes. That's in the roadmap. It'll be out soon on both android
| and iOS. Then on web.
| gedw99 wrote:
| aa
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| There's this Chrome add-on which also filters out the junk from
| recipes: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-
| filter/ahlc...
|
| It was featured in the MacOS Big Sur keynote being used with
| Safari but sadly hasn't made it to the App Store yet.
| gedw99 wrote:
| nice !!
| AlunAlun wrote:
| I rarely post on HN, but I'm breaking my silence to say that this
| app is amazing and I can see it changing my life!
| shaneprrlt wrote:
| Is this a real service, or just a portfolio project for your
| resume?
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| For now it's just a project. I learned Flutter and wanted to
| build something with it.
|
| If enough people like it, I will make this a full-fledged
| service.
|
| And focus on adding features like dark mode, server-sync, sign-
| in, account management, export/import of recipes, sharing
| screenshots of recipes like this one directly with your friends
| https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png
| ROARosen wrote:
| Really nice! I wonder how you get the parsed recipe to load
| so fast, much faster than say outline.com (though they prob
| have some more server-side stuff going on)
| arthurgibson wrote:
| I've been using this web app built by typesense as a demo, the
| non-clutter is ideal: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/
|
| prev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25365397
| 3guk wrote:
| It's such a shame that something like this has to exist and that
| the creators have to resort to a fairly fixed playbook of SEO
| techniques (like whole life story, recipe development etc etc).
|
| From my personal experience running a small tech tips site - it
| seems that I constantly end up further down the rankings cause I
| refuse to stuff each page with information that is not relevant.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| Sincere best wishes and good luck with this -- thank you! Then,
| please do the same for code sample sites. :)
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Thank you.
| perakojotgenije wrote:
| Shameless plug: you can save your favorite recipes to
| gabngabn.com[1] and then have your recipes without clutter.
|
| [1] https://gabngabn.com/init/default/about
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| I would recommend https://based.cooking/
|
| It started out as a joke but I have made a point of picking a
| recipe out of it every week to try.
|
| The stone soup one is fun and a nice story -
| https://based.cooking/almeirim-stone-soup.html
|
| You can also submit recipes on the Github repo -
| https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking
| mstudio wrote:
| Nicely done! I just ran into this "clutter" issue last week while
| trying to read a recipe that kept auto-scrolling due to a pop-up
| ad intermittently changing height at the top of the page. Some
| quick feedback: it worked perfectly for a recipe at
| "simplyrecipes.com" but was unable to find a recipe on the Food
| Network, specifically: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-
| brown/creme-brulee... Keep up the good work!
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.. Yes i am continuously "fixing" some
| sites that have very specific issues.
|
| Should be fixed in a few days.
| joshstrange wrote:
| If you are looking for a way to tame your recipes look into
| Paprika [0]. It can import/scrape recipes from any site and lets
| you organize them and save them for later. You can use it to
| build a shopping list, meal plan, track what you have on hand,
| and more. I always make a point to mention it on posts related to
| recipes since it's the best app I've found for recipes and worth
| every penny (no subscriptions, 1-time purchase). You can also
| export your recipes and share them with other people (last I
| checked the export file was essentially a zip with JSON inside
| and the pictures).
|
| [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Pro tip: if a recipe has a "Print" link on the recipe page,
| clicking it will most likely give you a "Reader mode" version of
| that page with the clutter removed.
| domoritz wrote:
| Could someone make a uBlock Origin filter list that removes the
| stuff before the recipe? I'd subscribe to that.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Freaking nice! It feels sooo good to dump that SEO garbage into
| dev/null.
| vigneshv_psg wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but a hack that i have found to read recipe
| websites on my phone is to use the "Print Recipe" link that most
| websites provide. It gets rid of most of the annoying ads,
| autoplaying videos and unzoomable text (or text tapping on which
| takes you to some random link because the page resized and you
| accidentally tapped on an ad).
|
| The "Print Recipe" page usually contains just the recipe in a
| format which is easy to read without any clutter.
| mongol wrote:
| My problem with recipes are - how do I know they are good? What
| is the quality control? Perhaps someone just grabbed a computer
| and wrote a bunch of steps down.
| adammenges wrote:
| I guess that's what ratings are for. Who knows if it'll taste
| good to your taste buds, but if many others like it that could
| be a good indication.
| schnevets wrote:
| In my experience, ratings are an inaccurate measurement. If you
| want to learn how to cook Pad Thai, are your going to trust the
| 5-star recipe with 30 responses, or the 3.9-star recipe with
| 3,100 responses??
|
| An active comment section tends to be a step above reviews,
| because at least you can see if other people find the recipe
| too spicy, or boring, or an exciting base for other
| ingredients. And no, 2 comments that say "I loved this recipe!"
| and "Thanks!" isn't sufficient. This is usually how you can
| tell a recipe on an aggregate of authors like FoodNetwork,
| AllRecipes, or NYTimes is legit.
|
| In my opinion, one step above an active comments section is
| following individual recipe writers that you jive with. An
| individual writer will usually have a measurement of success
| that you can agree with (health-conscious, budget-friendly,
| unique flavors, wide appeal), so you can understand their
| motivation better. Also, they have some credibility on the
| line. When you find writers that you agree with, you may even
| find their "filler" text to have some substance (another reason
| a "poseur" would feel obliged to include vapid copy before
| their recipe).
| pfranz wrote:
| Honestly, I tend to rely on the "brand" of where I'm getting
| the recipe. Ratings are only useful if you trust the site to
| have good ratings (either an active audience with similar taste
| or editors filtering and publishing with similar taste). I
| haven't seen it much, but I also worry about food safety for
| random recipes.
| adammenges wrote:
| I'm curious how you wrote the logic for recipe detection? I've
| know some others who've tried to solve this and like many pattern
| recognition tasks it turns out to be harder than you'd think, but
| not impossible of course. Just curious how you did it.
| JonathanBuchh wrote:
| It would be amazing if there was something that would convert
| recipes to the format used on Cooking For Engineers. It's so
| intuitive and easy to read. I never want to look at steps to make
| a recipe again.
|
| Scroll to the bottom to see what I'm talking about:
| http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
| duckmysick wrote:
| Modernist Cuisine has recipes with a similar format. They also
| have an ingredient list with baker's percentage using the
| largest ingredient by weight as the baseline.
|
| Example (second image)
| https://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/pressure-cooked-vegetab...
| yummypaint wrote:
| This is a great way to represent recipes! It looks like it
| would also allow more info to be fit on a notecard compared to
| just text
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Great thing about those recipes its not only the layout, it has
| the volumes in grams.
| midasuni wrote:
| How on Earth would you measure volume in grams?
| rembicilious wrote:
| Easy! water 150ml = water 150g /pedantry
|
| I think the op means it's nice that the ingredients are
| given by weight because it is more accurate than volume.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The job isn't over until we have gantt charts!
| bloopernova wrote:
| Specifically Gantt charts created from Org-mode inside Emacs
| :)
| dicroce wrote:
| Damn, that is awesome. We need an AI to convert text
| instructions into this format.
| cutoff wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I made digital recipe viewers to replace
| the old binders in our restaurants' kitchens. They're old iPad
| minis on Mosyle's free MDM plan. I made an HTML/CSS website
| hosted on Netlify/GitHub, created a home screen shortcut on the
| iPad using a web clip, and hide all other iOS apps so that they
| can only launch the recipe viewer.
|
| Everyone thinks I made an "app" because it launches in full
| screen thanks to the MDM. One of our kitchens doesn't have Wi-
| Fi, but once the recipe viewer is launched, it doesn't need
| connection anymore since it's a single HTML page and the
| refresh button is hidden.
|
| The recipes on my "app" use HTML tables fairly similar to the
| tables on the link you shared. I didn't know HTML tables could
| be formatted like they are on cookingforengineers.
| stuartbman wrote:
| I use CookBook which scans websites, and OCRs cookbooks with
| good success! I have all my regular recipes on there now
|
| https://thecookbookapp.com/
| mrestko wrote:
| Looks cool but did a very poor job of importing the first
| recipe I tried.
| Larrikin wrote:
| I use Paprika which doesn't ever seem to have problems for
| me. They offer a significant sale every year for
| Thanksgiving.
| eklbt wrote:
| I'm a paprika user as well. Recently found "Mela" on the
| App Store. Not as many features(yet) but the UI is so
| much better than Paprika.
| Larrikin wrote:
| I'd like an alternative to Paprika that is updated more
| often, but the lack of Android app makes Mela an
| immediate non starter
| mattschkolnick wrote:
| I think you'd like Pepper (www.peppertheapp.com/)
| mattschkolnick wrote:
| Maybe try Pepper (https://www.peppertheapp.com/)
| mdaniel wrote:
| For those similarly unable to find the pricing, it's hidden
| under a link on the Sign Up page:
| https://help.thecookbookapp.com/hc/en-
| gb/articles/3600025945...
|
| Currently, some different money for recipes as a service, and
| the weird price of $41 for a "lifetime" subscription
|
| It will interest this audience that they have a public
| roadmap, too: https://roadmap.thecookbookapp.com/cookbook
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Still a lot of text to get up and go, even if the context can
| be helpful.
|
| Personally I am a fan of the Food Network recipes online,
| especially Alton Brown's. Straight to the point with no fluff,
| and maybe a Good Eats segment if you're lucky.
| morsch wrote:
| There's a Recipe Card button in the top right; doesn't get
| more compact than that. Though I think I'd struggle cooking
| an unfamiliar recipe using only the card, like you said, the
| context is helpful (and so are some photos, I might add).
| djhn wrote:
| That is amazing. How is this not famous yet? Its even social
| media friendly!
| badwolf wrote:
| Oh! I love this recipe card style - Thanks for that!
| fouc wrote:
| You should link to the "recipe card" mode to show it better:
| http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
| artursapek wrote:
| That is very good dataviz
| JonathanBuchh wrote:
| It looks like my window to edit my comment is over, but I
| would have linked to the recipe view if I had know about it.
| Thanks!
| mdaniel wrote:
| It actually seems to mix visual metaphors though, since "Butter
| and flour a loaf pan" and "Preheat oven" are temporally top-to-
| bottom, until it gets to the ingredients, when it switches to
| (depending on how one interprets it) temporally left-to-right
| or a dependency tree, but without any visual indication that
| change has happened
|
| I would actually expect the whole process could be laid out in
| graphviz since all of those are dependencies of the ultimate
| outcome (heh, "enjoy"). I originally thought it may be a DAG,
| but I can recall a few recipes that explicitly have a looping
| step in them
| JackFr wrote:
| Honestly it's cute and clever, but not especially useful. I
| find it doesn't really add anything and is clever fir it's
| own sake.
|
| I know tastes differ, but personally I think it's terrible.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| The fact that this app is stealing content (that mostly makes
| money by ads) and monetizing it with ads is horrible. Right up
| the entitlement-alley of HN.
| shoulderfake wrote:
| Good, those sites don't deserve money.
| josephwegner wrote:
| See otrahuevada's top-level comment. The life story included
| in most recipes is not some blogger's attempt to spam you or
| sell you something. It's a copyright requirement - the only
| way they can protect their content.
| Abrownn wrote:
| They've been mass-spamming this on Reddit using multiple
| accounts and sockpuppeting to promote it too. They also
| promoted this in a Show-HN 5 days ago as well and it flopped:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733982
| natch wrote:
| I take it most of these recipes are hosted on low effort spam
| sites that stole the content in the first place. Are they also
| entitled to your righteous defense?
| drewbeck wrote:
| That's a very convenient assumption! "People who blog recipes
| are probably crappy anyway, so I'm morally clean" isn't a
| successful ethical system.
| natch wrote:
| But I wasn't sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that
| are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness
| (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I
| just want to cook something, it's fair use. If I am setting
| out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site,
| that's not cool obviously. Please consider more angles
| here.
| PolandKid wrote:
| We're considering the angle of an app whose sole purpose
| is to capture the valuable IP of an author and remove
| their ability to monetize it.
|
| It's not like they're paying them via some publisher
| program, just pure scraping and re-organizing.
| natch wrote:
| You may be right, if the sites truly own original content
| that is then being displayed in the app. It seems that is
| often not the case though.
| pb7 wrote:
| How is this any different than running an ad blocker or using
| Reader Mode in Safari, for example?
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| Ad blockers (the good ones) don't make money (other than by
| donations).
| knowfilter wrote:
| > Right up the entitlement-alley of HN
|
| What? HN doesn't encourage its users to bypass ad- and
| subscription-supported content.
|
| Oh wait, it does. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
| pxtail wrote:
| I agree, I think it's unethical and also wrong when looking
| from the angle of supporting (or at least not damaging) smaller
| websites owners and Internet where they are creating and
| maintaining own websites. Unfortunately open nature of non-
| walled internet makes it easy target for such predatory
| disgusting practices like this app is promoting.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I've given up and just try to find good cook books. I can't deal
| with internet recipes anymore. cool idea though!
| tonymet wrote:
| are you planning to index the recipes ? there are a couple other
| recipe transform apps out there but it's the indexing that will
| distinguish you .
| soamv wrote:
| For me, the context and reasoning behind why the recipe does what
| it does is much more important than the recipe itself; that makes
| such apps counterproductive.
|
| I can imagine that "just the recipe" is useful for very novice
| cooks, but most of the time it's much better to learn the
| patterns and techniques than to follow the precise recipe. You'll
| be much more prepared that way when things don't go to plan, or
| when you're missing a few ingredients.
|
| And this may be unpopular here, but I often enjoy the "life
| story" too: for me, many of the joys of cooking are in the
| connections made to other people. And if the recipe writer wants
| to build a connection with the cook because they poured so much
| effort into the recipe, I'm open to that -- and whatever it may
| bring to the actual cooking.
|
| (Maybe I should make a "just the code" browser extension for
| Github that deletes README files ;) )
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| The common complaint is about the unnecessary prose around the
| author's life history and other fluff that's useless to the
| goal of producing the food item. IME, seldom do those sites
| actually contain useful information about cooking practices in
| addition to the fluff.
| soamv wrote:
| It's not fluff to me -- it's human connection. Why we cook
| the way we do is deeply linked to our history and our "life
| stories".
| datavirtue wrote:
| It's not human connection. It is SEO fluff. Made up
| garbage.
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| If README files were:
|
| 1. Full of tangential life-story BS
|
| 2. Placed far above the content I went to the repo for
|
| 3. Filled with advertisements
|
| I would love your browser extension.
|
| Also, you claim the story is "much more important" than the
| recipe itself. So then I guess you would enjoy these recipes
| pretty much equally if they completely removed the ingredients
| of what they actually cooked? It's so much less important,
| after all.
| post_break wrote:
| How about only the stories from recipes, no recipe. Would be an
| ironic coffee table book.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| According to https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-
| protecte...: Recipes can be protected under
| copyright law if they are accompanied by "substantial literary
| expression." This expression can be an explanation or detailed
| directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often
| share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe's
| ingredients.
|
| So besides SEO, there's this thing where the recipe itself is
| basically defenseless against someone stealing it and calling it
| theirs but the sum of the fluff around it plus the recipe on the
| other hand can be copyrighted and enjoys all the protections
| afforded to these kinds of things. So, if say, Jamie Oliver likes
| your recipe and puts it in a book passing it as his, you can now
| legally tell him to stop doing that because of said fluff.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| hackcasual wrote:
| I don't think that's the case. He'd only get in trouble if he
| reproduced the "substantial literary expression." The actual
| list of ingredients and step-by-step procedure aren't
| copyrightable.
| morsch wrote:
| However (from your source), Even if the
| description of the recipe is sufficiently creative and
| copyrightable, the copyright will not cover the recipe's
| ingredient list, the underlying process for making the dish, or
| the resulting dish itself, which are all facts. It will only
| protect the expression of those facts. That means that someone
| can express the recipe in a different way -- with different
| expression -- and not infringe the recipe creator's copyright.
|
| So they can still put your recipe in a Jamie Oliver cookbook,
| they just have to put it in their own words as opposed to copy
| pasting it verbatim.
| tlhunter wrote:
| Is that PWA button fair to use? Been looking for something like
| that which matches the ubiquitous Android and iOS buttons.
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| One trick you can do is just to Print the recipe, and you get all
| ads removed in a nice clean view. Almost all the recipe sites I
| use have a Print button somewhere on the page.
|
| You could make an extension that literally calls Print on the
| page, and turn it into a PDF view from which you can save it.
| Your recipes could get stored locally or something, so you always
| have the website URL + clean recipe view stored.
|
| That way you support the site, and you get your recipes without
| destroying your eyes.
| hagope wrote:
| Would be cool if you could enter Yotube URL and you parse out the
| recipe from the audio/video.
| johnwatson11218 wrote:
| I have wanted to build something like this for consuming news
| sites, especially when my ad blocker has to be disabled. But
| thinking more long term ... what about a ML project that can look
| at many recipes and do a kind of PCA, figure out the essence of a
| pound cake for example and use actual data to show the main
| variations as clusters in a high dimensional state space. Or even
| try to reduce Thai or Mexican cooking to certain prototypical
| dishes and have versions at different skill levels for the
| aspiring home chef.
| Jonovono wrote:
| Awesome, i'm going to add this to my PWA browser:
| https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-private-minimal-browser/...
| sct202 wrote:
| For people who don't want to install an app, most recipe websites
| have a "Jump/Skip to Recipe" link at the top under the header and
| sometimes it's mixed up in between the fb/twitter share buttons.
| You still get hit with modals and videos but at least it's less.
| nucleogenesis wrote:
| Some blogs do the extra stuff right. Sally's Baking Addiction's
| preceding blog is often invaluable with tips about timing,
| temperatures, possible places things can go wrong, etc.
|
| It has the floating "skip to recipe" button which is handy when
| you come back to a familiar recipe for some details.
|
| The clutter isn't the problem as much as the content quality is
| most often for me.
| adammenges wrote:
| Feature request: Add in the iOS app safari extension thing so you
| when you browse to `www.allrecipes.com` or similar it opens in
| your app.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I just happened to be looking into a shakshuka recipe and as per
| usual every website is 90% life story, background, history of the
| mesopotamia era...
|
| This worked perfectly and will make shopping a bit easier.
| Example below.
|
| https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://www.loveandlemons.com/sh...
| shortformblog wrote:
| This is theft that gets around a copyright loophole. Don't steal
| recipes.
| pjerem wrote:
| It's complicated.
|
| Where is the limit ?
|
| For me it's just a web browser optimized for recipe websites.
| It's basic scrapping. Google does it, why can't I do it ?
|
| Are "reader mode" browser extensions theft ? Are ad blockers
| theft ?
|
| Is using Lynx as a web browser theft ?
|
| If your business depends on your content never being scraped,
| you are screwed.
| nybble41 wrote:
| It's not that complicated. Copyright was simply never
| intended to apply to recipes. The fact that there is nothing
| copyrightable about a mere list of ingredients and basic
| preparation instructions without any creative elements is not
| in any sense a "loophole".
| pjerem wrote:
| Also that.
| short12 wrote:
| There is no stealing when it comes to recipes. There is no
| loophole it's a very special feature of copyright. One of the
| few sane ones
| darkstar999 wrote:
| Copy Me That does this and more, if anyone is interested in
| comparing. It doesn't have a polished UI but it's very useful for
| me. https://www.copymethat.com/
| kwerk wrote:
| My wife and I are heavy users of CMT. Especially the ability to
| add recipes to a specific day and create a unified shopping
| list sorted by type (produce, spices, etc).
|
| I do wish there was a more modern multi-platform alternative.
| CPM recently stopped updating their iOS app so we can't use
| with recent iOS.
| troyvit wrote:
| I have to admit that recipes are valuable enough to me that I'm
| OK with the crap at the top. It's annoying, but it's an endearing
| kind of annoyance. The way I see it, they're providing a service
| and if they want to do it in this stupid way I'll go along with
| it, especially since the content isn't exactly horrible, it's
| just silly and inane and somehow adds to the whole cooking
| experience.
|
| Sometimes the stuff I'm cooking actually turns out differently
| because of all the mad scrolling I do trying to find the next
| ingredient to add while my sauce pan is boiling over or whatever.
| Kindof fun.
|
| Last, recipe books are a great way to get around this crap, and
| then you're actually paying for the knowledge you use.
| infini8 wrote:
| Love the standardised layout. Another step towards simplified
| digital consumption this year.
|
| Reminds of Tandoor: https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes
| y04nn wrote:
| It is interesting that there is not yet a Wikipedia of recipes.
| It would be the perfect use case for a wiki. People would love to
| share their recipes variations and improve/fix existing one.
|
| There would be a standard layout, introduction paragraph would
| explain the history of a recipe and link to other similar
| recipes. That would be interesting to read.
|
| And there would be an endless number of recipes. For-profit sites
| are full of ads and SEO optimized to improve user
| retention/engagement, which make them annoying to use. A wiki
| could be print friendly and distraction-free, which would be
| perfect for a recipe.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I don't think it would make sense to let everyone edit recipes.
| One person's "improvement" is another person's "travesty". Try
| adding garlic to carbonara and see what your insult:compliment
| ratio is.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Not a Wikipedia, but in Germany we have chefkoch.de, which is a
| commercial user content website which uses a sort of
| standardized format. As others have pointed out, recipes are
| not meant to be as canonical as dictionary entries.
|
| Here's an example page of one recipe:
| https://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/343371118405722/American-App...
| layer8 wrote:
| The edit wars would be horrible. Everyone has their own recipe
| for any given food item, plus endless variations.
| y04nn wrote:
| I'm not sure, is there not one standard, most accepted recipe
| and then N variations? Also, I would not except edits to be
| on ingredients, but mostly on the method. If a user would
| want to modify ingredients, he could create a his "regional"
| variation.
|
| But I see the wiki more as a reference book on recipes and
| their well known variations (which is mostly what I'm looking
| for when searching for a recipe) than a sharing
| platform/pseudo social network.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > is there not one standard, most accepted recipe and then
| N variations?
|
| No. In many cases there are N variations that all claim to
| be the standard.
| kuschku wrote:
| Make it a namespaced wiki. Every user can only create and
| edit recipes in their own namespace, or the namespace of
| groups they're a member of (like GitHub treats repos for
| example).
|
| Then you could, as user, follow users you like. Each recipe
| would be in structured format, but could also have rich text
| introductions / explanations, if users wish to add such
| information.
|
| You could even let users add custom styling to their own
| namespaces/subwikis, as tumblr, myspace, wordpress, youtube
| and reddit used to do / still do (with a way to turn this off
| as user, if you just want the plain content)
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| then it comes down to just building your own reddit style
| site centered around food recipes
| nybble41 wrote:
| > (like GitHub treats repos for example)
|
| This is the way. Publicly read-only repos with easy access
| to forking and pull requests are far superior to wiki pages
| with no access controls. Compared to current GitHub you
| would mainly need to add support for structured data,
| ratings, and indexing.
| patrickserrano wrote:
| Mela on iOS[0] is a very similar app with some great polish. One
| nice thing with Mela at least, is if you use the built-in browser
| it can get around some paywalls like NYT Cooking. It also
| integrates with the Reminders app for grocery shopping lists.
|
| [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-
| manager/id15484660...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Reading good food writers is the whole point of having good food
| writers. They can build an evocative sense of the time and place,
| the sense of why a recipie is the way it is. Its sometimes a
| personal journey, its sometimes escapism. And yes it changes -
| Elizabeth David sounds outrageously prissy to modern ears - but
| food has always been part of human culture, and as we evolve so
| will our food. Its fine to read the wikipedia "plot" section if
| you want a shortcut. But its nice to know you can just read the
| whole book. Slowly.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Save it for a read that someone would seek out deliberately for
| the long-form content though. This wouldn't exist if people
| loved the long rambling intros about how ever since the 1400s
| Spaghetti Bolognese has captured the hearts and minds of
| italians and their diaspora. blah blah blah
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I did say good food writers :-)
| robotpony wrote:
| I like the Serious Eats format, where they provide both a brief
| recipe and an optional backstory. Some of the research and
| reasoning is interesting for certain recipes (like pressure
| cooker French Onion soup), though when actually cooking the
| story makes finding the details a bit more work.
| notyourwork wrote:
| The use case sounds great but why does everything need an app
| anymore? Everything doesn't need an app, thats why we have the
| web.
|
| /end rant.
| fancy_pantser wrote:
| In the same vein, I made the Recipe Filter extension for
| browsers:
|
| Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-
| filter/ahlc...
|
| FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-
| filter...
|
| Source code (there's Safari in there if you don't mind building
| it yourself): https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
|
| I was spurred into action by a comment here on HN back in 2017:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755378
|
| It got demoed to the world during WWDC 2020, which was really
| neat: https://youtu.be/Kwh2y6VkzoA
| julianlam wrote:
| Thanks for creating this! I use this plugin all the time.
|
| I often don't remember it's running, but then I invariably land
| on a recipe site, and then the Recipe Filter modal pops up, and
| instantly brings a smile to my face.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| This extension is wonderful! Using it for a few months. It's
| refreshing to go to a recipe page and actually see the recipe
| :-D
| strig wrote:
| Yo thanks for making that extension! I've actually recommended
| it to a bunch of friends and family
| adammenges wrote:
| Is it not on the safari 'store' because of the $99 a year?
| mhh__ wrote:
| See also https://based.cooking/
| andai wrote:
| Discussed previously (446 comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419717
| megraf wrote:
| This is my suggestion as well. I've used it for dozens of
| meals.
| mvexel wrote:
| As some other commenters have said -- often, the "print" function
| will give you a more concise / readable version. I keep a recipe
| folder with PDFs "printed" from recipe web sites.
|
| It would be nice if this app would support printing. It does a
| great job reducing this recipe page to its essentials:
| https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://cookieandkate.com/best-v...
| but when I try to print, the preview shows a blank page (Safari
| on Mac).
| brewtide wrote:
| I believe this is by design. If you subscribe to their
| "premium" model, it lets you print as usual.
|
| Honestly, not a terrible way to make money, while offering a
| free service.
| mattschkolnick wrote:
| Pepper (https://www.peppertheapp.com/) is the easiest place to
| find recipes with no clutter or ads, and also share
| recipes/dishes with fam & friends in a standardized view. It's a
| social network for cooking. A lot of people and food creators
| have joined recently, there's been some great content.
| danychok wrote:
| Ben Awad developed a great little app which addresses this
| problem also. I believe he developed it with his mother - who is
| a the designer. https://www.mysaffronapp.com/
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I've been using that app for a while. It's pretty nice.
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| It can get frustrating skimming through text walls just to find
| the recipe on blogs/sites. Authors do it to get high ranking on
| Google. You can use OnlyRecipe.app to extract the recipe
| information. It works on almost all sites/blogs which follow a
| recipe standard when they post.
|
| You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan
| recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila.
|
| Android:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeak...
|
| iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1602130759
|
| Short 50-seconds video on how recipe camera scanner works
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziSNwjv9PXo
|
| Currently working on a feature that lets you share recipe "image
| cards" with your friends.. Something like this
| https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png
|
| Let me know if you'd use that feature
| logifail wrote:
| > Authors do it to get high ranking on Google [..]
|
| I believe it's more likely that it's to do with whether you can
| or can't copyright a listing of ingredients and method.
|
| If you add enough of a story, you definitely can.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| No. As somebody who pays recipe creators and publishes
| recipes this is just wrong.
|
| The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it
| logifail wrote:
| > The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it
|
| Separate in a copyright sense?
|
| A web scraping bot won't necessarily make that distinction.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Yes in a copyright sense. Recipes are also separate in a
| technical sense too because for SEO purposes publishers
| use markup to help crawlers understand recipes.
| zffr wrote:
| Could be wrong, but I thought it was so that you spend more
| time on their website and have a chance to see more ads
| candiddevmike wrote:
| The irony of having an ad supported app to scrape recipes from
| ad supported websites. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Technology companies selling a solution to a problem created
| by technology companies instead of coming together to fix the
| original problem. This is the world we live in.
| massysett wrote:
| The original problem is that people want to Google for
| recipes and not pay for them.
|
| As a cook there are several solutions to this:
|
| 1) pay for a subscription from vendors who are in business
| to sell recipes, such as Cooks Illustrated
|
| 2) get recipes from companies that provide them as a
| complement because they sell something else, generally
| food-related products. For instance King Arthur Baking has
| good recipes, and many are available from food companies
| such as Tyson, Kraft, and Betty Crocker. Grocers also have
| many recipes. These sources aren't interested in spamming
| users with ads because the website is one big ad.
|
| 3) Buy cookbooks, they're not expensive.
|
| But yeah as long as people want to crank search terms into
| Google and get "free" stuff, it's going to be ad-infested,
| and then other ad-seeking folks are going to run their
| shakedown operations just like the adblock extensions
| charge money to advertisers to let their ads through.
| PolandKid wrote:
| @AwkwardPanda
|
| And how does a site opt out of your scraping? Do you have a
| unique user-agent when you scrape? A set of IPs?
| cryptonym wrote:
| Spending time writing user-hostile recipe for SEO purpose, then
| someone else building an app trying to undo this and finally
| the end user spending time installing app, scanning QR code and
| going back to the original user-hostile website because the app
| didn't get milk quantity. Now I'm too tired to cook anything.
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Hey can you share the url.. I will fix small issues like
| this..
| cryptonym wrote:
| It's visible on your video ;-)
| [deleted]
| shortformblog wrote:
| FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies.
| https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| Wrong, "foodies" are about to get eaten alive by people sick
| of their shit. The only people complaining loudly about that
| were the people propagating the BS. I certainly don't see any
| complaints from users mentioned in that article.
|
| If your business model relies on people scrolling past a
| bunch of filler to get to a short list of instructions, be
| prepared for people to get tired of it and solve the problem.
| fleddr wrote:
| Agree. Their business model isn't a business model. A
| recipe to the audience we're talking about is
| worth...nothing. So you're building a business model on
| something that has near-zero value. And try to still get
| some value out of it regardless:
|
| "Essays meanwhile allow bloggers to make money off search
| engine optimization (or SEO, which scans the essays for
| keywords and relevant search terms) and ads allow the blog
| to remain free for readers."
|
| So here they openly admit to the hack. This entire fraud is
| one app or google algorithm tweak away from being
| annihilated.
|
| It should be seen as a side job with expectation zero, any
| money is a bonus, not something you do to "feed your
| family". I mean, read this rant:
|
| https://www.eater.com/2020/3/31/21201374/why-are-free-
| online...
|
| Delusional.
| floren wrote:
| They're full of shit, though. Crack open the Better Homes &
| Gardens cookbook and find a cookie recipe, then search for
| the same recipe name online. You're going to find 1000 word
| essays about Dear Meema's Secret Snickerdoodle recipe...
| followed by the same damn recipe as the BH&G cookbook.
| shortformblog wrote:
| This is an anecdote which clearly does not cover all cases.
| I think the presumption is that cooking sites are nothing
| but spam, but the fact that so many high-profile cooks
| complained about this perviously shows that this is not the
| case and that their livelihoods would be affected by apps
| like these.
| mattschkolnick wrote:
| check out Pepper https://www.peppertheapp.com/
| floren wrote:
| Matt, creating an HN account purely to pitch your product
| like this in an only-slightly-related thread ain't cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mattschkolnick
|
| https://www.peppertheapp.com/about
| gitgud wrote:
| Interesting that [1] the website in question has been removed
| and replaced with an apology.
|
| [1] https://recipeasly.com/
| mfashby wrote:
| similar discussion recently
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29161585
|
| similar open-source program plainoldrecipe
| https://plainoldrecipe.com/
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe returns a HTTP 400 error,
| https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does not.
| mfashby wrote:
| Ah thanks, fixed
| harel wrote:
| Every time I open a recipe online these days, I sigh so loudly
| out of desperation of what I need to scroll through to get to the
| actual recipe. And that is before I do the cookie dance.
|
| I guess you guys heard my sighs!!! Amazing. Thanks!
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Feedback: visiting recipe pages, such as the one bearjaws shared,
| using Safari[0] can result in you being "trapped" -- the back
| button doesn't have the desired effect. It looks like onlyrecipe
| may be doing something to the web history.
|
| 0: Safari on iOS 15.2, iPhone 8.
| AwkwardPanda wrote:
| Hey, that's surprisingly very annoying. Thanks a lot for that
| feedback. I'll fix it ASAP.
|
| In addition, I would encourage you to try the iOS app. Way
| better experience.
|
| Because this is a app-first service. Web was built later.
| mtm7 wrote:
| > What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail,
| follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph
| "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a
| crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual
| recipe?
|
| I lived with a food blogger for six years and might be able to
| provide some more perspective for these types of comments (beyond
| just SEO).
|
| First, there's actually an audience that _is_ interested in this
| type of content. Some are repeat readers who want to follow food
| bloggers' lives, similar to how HN readers might follow a
| streamer on Twitch. It's a much more rewarding journey if people
| don't just see you as a recipe database and bounce, but actually
| engage with you and follow you over time.
|
| Second, a lot of food bloggers simply enjoy writing and see their
| blogs as a way to express themselves. Some of them write these
| stories for their family and friends and didn't think they'd be
| at the top of Google.
|
| Third, it takes a ton of effort to write a single recipe. I can't
| speak for others, but hers involved multiple days of
| planning/cooking/shooting, remaking it several times so she knew
| it'd be consistent for the reader, planning/shooting/editing the
| photos, and even scrapping recipes altogether if they didn't work
| out. She also had to deal with the business end of things (like
| getting a lawyer, accountant, social media manager, and managing
| contracts with sponsors). Her attitude was basically, "if I'm
| doing all of these things to provide someone with a free recipe,
| they can scroll past my story if they don't feel like reading
| it". (That being said, her site was pretty minimalist compared to
| other food blogs - she didn't run ads.)
|
| FWIW, I don't have a problem with onlyrecipe.app, I just wanted
| to share this because I'd be interested if I didn't know already.
| slingnow wrote:
| I have yet to meet or read about a single person who has ever
| said "I really enjoy scrolling through twenty paragraphs of
| backstory and embedded auto-play videos and advertisements
| while I browse for recipes."
|
| So while I'm sure there exist bloggers who put care into these
| things, a tiny minority of people seem to find any value there.
| In fact it now seems that so many people are aggravated by this
| style that an app to remove them all has been developed.
| [deleted]
| rbone80 wrote:
| Also the story is one thing but the painfully verbose
| explanation of each ingredient is ridiculous. I really don't
| want or need an explanation of flour, sugar, salt, etc...
| That's the content that really makes me annoyed at a blog
| recipe.
|
| Like many others I have mostly abandoned blogs in favor of
| tried and true cookbooks.
| SllX wrote:
| As with all things written: the writing is there for the
| audience who will read it, not the people that will not.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I'm not sure that 'people you haven't met' is necessarily a
| tiny minority.
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