Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

https://showcase.onlyrecipe.app/

by AwkwardPanda • 5 years ago

560 341 5 years ago

showcase.onlyrecipe.app

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

logifail2• 5 years ago

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-issue2• 5 years ago

No. As somebody who pays recipe creators and publishes recipes this is just wrong.

The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it

zffr• 5 years ago

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

cryptonym2• 5 years ago

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.

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

Hey can you share the url.. I will fix small issues like this..

JeremyNT• 5 years ago

All we're missing is crypto/NFTs to create a full circle of tech bullshit.

candiddevmike• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

PolandKid3• 5 years ago

@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?

shortformblog3• 5 years ago

FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies. https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...

floren• 5 years ago

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.

butwhywhyoh3• 5 years ago

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.

gitgud• 5 years ago

Interesting that [1] the website in question has been removed and replaced with an apology.

[1] https://recipeasly.com/

bearjaws• 5 years ago

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...

mhh__• 5 years ago

See also https://based.cooking/

megraf• 5 years ago

This is my suggestion as well. I've used it for dozens of meals.

andai• 5 years ago

Discussed previously (446 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419717

notreallyserio• 5 years ago

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.

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

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.

asow922• 5 years ago

reminds me of https://www.paprikaapp.com/

asow922• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ziggus• 5 years ago

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.

actualwill• 5 years ago

Every time I see a recipe app, I wonder if it will stack up to Paprika. It never does. It parses every recipe website and the sync works perfectly.

mirthturtle• 5 years ago

Someone tried this a while back and it didn't go so well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/03/02/recipeasly-fo...

gamerDude3• 5 years ago

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.

gamerDude3• 5 years ago

Or just move the recipe to the top and keep all the other content/ads below.

metabagel• 5 years ago

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.

toyg2• 5 years ago

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).

kixiQu5• 5 years ago

private, hence uninfringing

let me know how this goes for private torrent tracker sites

Hard_Space• 5 years ago

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.

renewiltord4• 5 years ago

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.

fknorangesite• 5 years ago

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.

dendrite9• 5 years ago

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.com/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...

fleddr2• 5 years ago

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.

artursapek2• 5 years ago

That guy had absolutely no conviction once he started getting called out. He did a complete 180 in the weakest way.

tomredman• 5 years ago

I mean, this is true. But it’s weird being in the center of that raging fire. We were worried about getting sued personally (there were lots of threats) and or having our family or work brought it into it. Lots of people tried to get me fired. In the moment, it just wasn’t a fight we wanted to fight.

switzer2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

A choice between metric and imperial would be nice too

thepratt• 5 years ago

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.

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I'll see if that conversion can be done in a generic way.

geocar• 5 years ago

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/

hellweaver666• 5 years ago

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.

joshstrange2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

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.

switzer2• 5 years ago

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!

2bitencryption• 5 years ago

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"?

Rygian• 5 years ago

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/

littlecranky672• 5 years ago

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).

pfranz2• 5 years ago

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/structure...

walligatorrr• 5 years ago

Interesting but this app doesn’t seem to be having a hard time scraping and publishing the recipe material without copyright.

joshgachnang• 5 years ago

People scroll more, so higher engagement and lower bounce rate metrics with the site (which I think helps with search ranking)

seanhunter• 5 years ago

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.

technothrasher2• 5 years ago

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

rjzzleep• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I have literally never met anyone express (2). Any time anyone needs a recipe site they immediately start complaining about it, unprompted.

nerdjon• 5 years ago

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.

password14• 5 years ago

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.

gamerDude3• 5 years ago

If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?

Ansil849• 5 years ago

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.

throw8383833jj• 5 years ago

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.

charlietango• 5 years ago

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?

AlexandrB• 5 years ago

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.

bee_rider• 5 years ago

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."

jordansmith• 5 years ago

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

elwell• 5 years ago

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.

floatrock• 5 years ago

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.

tiborsaas2• 5 years ago

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.

cguess• 5 years ago

There's a new one coming for a Media Fact Check as well. https://schema.org/MediaReview

cvg• 5 years ago

This is interesting. Looks like the app might be just parsing this schema from the webpage and adding a nice ui.

msielski• 5 years ago

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...

shoulderfake3• 5 years ago

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.

_ttg• 5 years ago

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

zhte415• 5 years ago

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.

kixiQu5• 5 years ago

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?

ethbr0• 5 years ago

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?

danielvaughn• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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!

lkxijlewlf2• 5 years ago

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!"

bluGill3• 5 years ago

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).

bluGill3• 5 years ago

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)

johnfn• 5 years ago

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.

giaour2• 5 years ago

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.

avaika• 5 years ago

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.

foofoo4u• 5 years ago

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.

adwww2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

think of how niche Rust is compared to Apple Pie

jenscow• 5 years ago

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.

laurentlbm• 5 years ago

Thank you, I hate blog-post-type recipes! Do you plan on adding a dark mode?

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

Yes. That's in the roadmap. It'll be out soon on both android and iOS. Then on web.

mrsuprawsm• 5 years ago

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.

shaneprrlt• 5 years ago

Is this a real service, or just a portfolio project for your resume?

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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)

kerneloftruth• 5 years ago

Sincere best wishes and good luck with this -- thank you! Then, please do the same for code sample sites. :)

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

Thank you.

domoritz• 5 years ago

Could someone make a uBlock Origin filter list that removes the stuff before the recipe? I'd subscribe to that.

JonathanBuchh2• 5 years ago

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...

yummypaint• 5 years ago

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

dicroce• 5 years ago

Damn, that is awesome. We need an AI to convert text instructions into this format.

dfithian2• 5 years ago

I created this app to scrape a website's HTML for recipe and ingredients and create a grocery list. It works for recipes in many formats.

https://mo-nomz.herokuapp.com

duckmysick• 5 years ago

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...

stuartbman• 5 years ago

I use CookBook which scans websites, and OCRs cookbooks with good success! I have all my regular recipes on there now

https://thecookbookapp.com/

mdaniel2• 5 years ago

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

mrestko• 5 years ago

Looks cool but did a very poor job of importing the first recipe I tried.

mdaniel2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

badwolf• 5 years ago

Oh! I love this recipe card style - Thanks for that!

rm_-rf_slash• 5 years ago

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.

morsch2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

That is amazing. How is this not famous yet? Its even social media friendly!

fouc• 5 years ago

You should link to the "recipe card" mode to show it better: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...

artursapek2• 5 years ago

That is very good dataviz

JonathanBuchh2• 5 years ago

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!

robbyking• 5 years ago

This is amazing!

I have ADHD so I often find my self taking a non-linear route to following a recipe: Step 1, Step 3, Step 4, oops! Step 2, now where was I? Is that salt or baking powder in the bowl?

6gvONxR4sf7o• 5 years ago

The job isn't over until we have gantt charts!

bloopernova• 5 years ago

Specifically Gantt charts created from Org-mode inside Emacs :)

cutoff• 5 years ago

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.

GrumpyNl• 5 years ago

Great thing about those recipes its not only the layout, it has the volumes in grams.

midasuni2• 5 years ago

How on Earth would you measure volume in grams?

dfithian2• 5 years ago

Similar app which converts recipes to a grocery list!

https://mo-nomz.herokuapp.com

pinerd3• 5 years ago

woah that is cool

chaxor• 5 years ago

This is nice.

I have always been interested in seeing a database which had consistent units and ingredients as well, such that pulling the full database and doing visualizations could be easily done.

This would also make the adjustment to the batch size for each recipe on each webpage much simpler.

"Want 1 Liter of dough for 2 banana bread loafs? Just change the amount output field and watch the values change". Type of thing.

Obviously I know heat transfer effects need to be taken into account and such for some things, but it would be at least a start . Then the real mass/heat transfer and such engineering fun can begin.

hahajk• 5 years ago

That’s pretty cool recipe formatting, but man that site has the least appetizing food photography I’ve seen in a long time.

umvi• 5 years ago

It's for engineers. Function > Form

Ntrails• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm an outlier, but holy hell I cannot read that format at all.

jka2• 5 years ago

If you like this kind of representation for recipe preparation steps, you might also enjoy "Cookbook for Nerds":

https://www.cookbookfornerds.com/

jka2• 5 years ago

(nb: may be inaccessible at the moment via https; worth trying http if so)

sct202• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

patrickserrano• 5 years ago

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...

danychok• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I've been using that app for a while. It's pretty nice.

mstudio• 5 years ago

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!

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.. Yes i am continuously "fixing" some sites that have very specific issues.

Should be fixed in a few days.

mfashby2• 5 years ago

similar discussion recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29161585

similar open-source program plainoldrecipe https://plainoldrecipe.com/

Gualdrapo• 5 years ago

https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe returns a HTTP 400 error, https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does not.

mfashby2• 5 years ago

Ah thanks, fixed

markstos• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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 wholepeeledtomato* 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.

thrower123• 5 years ago

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

gedw992• 5 years ago

nice !!

joshstrange2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

johnwatson11218• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Awesome, i'm going to add this to my PWA browser: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-private-minimal-browser/...

infini82• 5 years ago

Love the standardised layout. Another step towards simplified digital consumption this year.

Reminds of Tandoor: https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes

mvexel• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

Oh shoot. I did not expect this huge a response. Any more load and my backend server is going to collapse.

js2• 5 years ago

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.

hnrodey• 5 years ago

Aggregating to handwritten version is very nice. A recipe box is a terrific artifact to hand down through generations.

Congrats.

vestrigi2• 5 years ago

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.

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

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.

jeffbee• 5 years ago

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.

post_break• 5 years ago

How about only the stories from recipes, no recipe. Would be an ironic coffee table book.

y04nn2• 5 years ago

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.

layer8• 5 years ago

The edit wars would be horrible. Everyone has their own recipe for any given food item, plus endless variations.

kuschku• 5 years ago

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)

y04nn2• 5 years ago

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.

idontwantthis• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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...

wlonkly• 5 years ago

There's Wikibooks Cookbook, but it has nowhere near the reach of Wikipedia.

Here's what began as my wife's banana bread recipe many years ago: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Banana_Bread

short122• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Web written for Googlebot, not humans.

wombat-man• 5 years ago

I've given up and just try to find good cook books. I can't deal with internet recipes anymore. cool idea though!

tonymet• 5 years ago

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 .

shortformblog3• 5 years ago

This is theft that gets around a copyright loophole. Don’t steal recipes.

pjerem2• 5 years ago

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.

nybble414• 5 years ago

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".

short122• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

notyourwork2• 5 years ago

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.

leifg• 5 years ago

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.

3guk• 5 years ago

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.

vigneshv_psg• 5 years ago

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.

fancy_pantser2• 5 years ago

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

adammenges4• 5 years ago

Is it not on the safari 'store' because of the $99 a year?

daveidol• 5 years ago

Not the OP, but I maintain an extension for using keyboard and mouse on Xbox xCloud.

I'd love to support Safari, and like OP I have it technically working as well, but as the extension is free and open source it's hard to justify the $99 price tag just to share it with the world. https://github.com/idolize/xcloud-keyboard-mouse/issues/13

julianlam• 5 years ago

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.

strig• 5 years ago

Yo thanks for making that extension! I've actually recommended it to a bunch of friends and family

john-tells-all• 5 years ago

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

SargeZT• 5 years ago

Funny running into you here! I'm the 'maintainer' of the Firefox version (it doesn't take much work.) I just got a request to do imperial to metric conversion, which I had to politely decline based on the idea of looking up the density of every ingredient involved; not to mention writing an actual parser for recipies proved to be quite a challenge given the wide diversity of how the recipes are layed out.

fancy_pantser2• 5 years ago

I get loads of really kind emails and messages on a daily basis from the users. It's been really rewarding in that way. A couple ideas that people have put forth seem really reasonable, such as unit conversions, print-friendly pages, and automatic nutrition labels. In fact, I'd actually love those too as a cook!

One feature that would improve the recipe recognition and unlock lots of other features where it's found would be JSON-LD support. I'm seeing lots of recipe pages containing those handy, structured formats lately.

A comment about JSON-LD: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter/issues/22#issuec...

But all of these things stray from the fundamental simplicity of what it does. The code is just 92 lines of JS and works (or breaks!) transparently. If I started adding features, it would quickly become another complex system to maintain and I have plent of that at work ;)

RamblingCTO2• 5 years ago

Woah nice, just installed it! Perfect, thank you so much. I don't care for the life stories and pseudo deep insights, I wanna cook and eat stuff.

arthurgibson• 5 years ago

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

mongol• 5 years ago

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.

adammenges4• 5 years ago

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.

pfranz2• 5 years ago

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.

schnevets2• 5 years ago

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).

adammenges4• 5 years ago

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.

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

So schema.org has a standard json schema for recipes. Crawlers use this information to parse and figure out what kind of content lives on the page.

Since google encourages this and ranks pages with schema higher, all recipe blogs and sites add this schema to their html.

This is structured data. I just parse this json.

Not all recipes follow this though. So you may occasionally see error messages for old sites that have not implemented schema.org structure.

adammenges4• 5 years ago

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.

otrahuevada• 5 years ago

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.

hackcasual• 5 years ago

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.

morsch2• 5 years ago

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.

troyvit• 5 years ago

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.

mtm7• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

SllX• 5 years ago

As with all things written: the writing is there for the audience who will read it, not the people that will not.

rbone80• 5 years ago

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.

lazyasciiart3• 5 years ago

I'm not sure that 'people you haven't met' is necessarily a tiny minority.

ryanmcbride• 5 years ago

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

tlhunter• 5 years ago

Is that PWA button fair to use? Been looking for something like that which matches the ubiquitous Android and iOS buttons.

hagope• 5 years ago

Would be cool if you could enter Yotube URL and you parse out the recipe from the audio/video.

Pete-Codes• 5 years ago

ha, I always have to navigate whimsical tales of Italian grandfathers etc to get to the actual recipe so this is a good idea

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

Freaking nice! It feels sooo good to dump that SEO garbage into dev/null.

newfonewhodis2• 5 years ago

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.

natch3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

knowfilter• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

pb7• 5 years ago

How is this any different than running an ad blocker or using Reader Mode in Safari, for example?

newfonewhodis2• 5 years ago

Ad blockers (the good ones) don't make money (other than by donations).

Abrownn• 5 years ago

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

shoulderfake3• 5 years ago

Good, those sites don't deserve money.

josephwegner• 5 years ago

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.

soamv2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

soamv2• 5 years ago

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".

butwhywhyoh3• 5 years ago

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.

mothsonasloth• 5 years ago

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

figbert• 5 years ago

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.

perakojotgenije• 5 years ago

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

lifeisstillgood2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

lifeisstillgood2• 5 years ago

I did say good food writers :-)

robotpony• 5 years ago

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.

TheFlyingFish• 5 years ago

Agreed. I would even be ok with the SE format if they didn't split out the main recipe from the backstory, because with them the backstory is usually something of substance. They often go through multiple iterations, explaining what tweaks they introduced and what the effects were, so that you can understand not only the final recipe but also the principles that went into making it.

That they also give you a quick-and-easy "here's just the recipe" page is just an added bonus, for me.

djur• 5 years ago

I love good food writers, but most people who publish recipes online are not good food writers, and SEO tactics lead them to preface their recipes not with information about the development of the recipe or the food's cultural context, but with rambling space-filler about how it's summer now, and how it's nice to eat summer foods in the summer, and there are delicious farm-fresh veggies in the summer, and this summer veggie salad really tastes like summer, and how as a kid the author would also eat veggies in the summer, and how even though the author's husband ("the Truck-Drivin' Man") and their three boys ("Colt, Smith, and Wesson") normally don't like veggies that much, they really love this salad...

Interspersed liberally with enormous high-res photos of the finished product, the ingredients, stock photos of summertime, etc. And because those SEO tricks seem to work, this type of site absolutely dominates the search results for recipes. The recipes are often fine, too (probably because they're frequently cribbed from cookbooks with a few tweaks).

seabea• 5 years ago

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".

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

QR code scanner does work. I've scanned hundreds of QR codes. If you can share the url, I can see what's wrong.

Regarding "How to use?", yes this is an issue on android. If you click multiple times, it will work.

I will fix it.

Regarding http/https, I'll implement that.

AlunAlun• 5 years ago

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!

me_me_mu_mu• 5 years ago

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.

harel• 5 years ago

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!

m4rc3lv• 5 years ago

Works on a lot of sites, nice job. I can't pull recipes from McDougall. https://www.drmcdougall.com/recipes/white-beans-mexicali/

brutal_chaos_• 5 years ago

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

amelius• 5 years ago

Isn't this what "Reader Mode" is for?

v_p_n_p_v• 5 years ago

My dream is to build a browser to do this for the entire web, using AI/ML to "translate" ad-ridden sites to their pure HTML/CSS counterpart. Lots of pre-trained models can make sense of pages based on visual layout. Seq2seq/summarizer models can work hand-in-hand to take out the cruft.

I imagine a cache of this simple web shared across all browsers.

Imagine translating all PDF manuals, scientific research, and yes, recipes, in this decentralized manner. The dataset would be clean both for human consumption as well as ML training.

jessehattabaugh• 5 years ago

Props for building a PWA, but why do I have to copy paste a url into it when the Share Target API would allow me to send the URL directly to you app using the browser's share feature?

AwkwardPanda13• 5 years ago

There are multiple ways to do it. Copy-paste and share both are supported. You can use whichever is convenient.

kpmcc• 5 years ago

I just tried Firefox's 'Reader Mode' for my go to recipe site (food52) and it worked like a charm making everything less distracting.

cabalamat• 5 years ago

Why does it need a URL? I should be able to search on e.g. "banana cake" and get banana cake recipes.

dskloet2• 5 years ago

If an image fails to load, there is an animation which is still quite distracting. Can that just be a static broken imagine icon?

For example here: https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://www.allrecipes.com/recip...

dskloet2• 5 years ago

If you create a bookmark with the following URL, you can click it while on a recipe site to go to the OnlyRecipe version:

    javascript:window.location.href='https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=' + (window.location.href)

danguson• 5 years ago

It's a helpful app that makes cooking easier and intuitive.

lanamo• 5 years ago

I am using MELA https://mela.recipes - also being frustrated with recipes and the amount of unnecessary blabla, this app is awesome. it de-clutters recipes, has a cooking mode (shows you step by step) and a grocery shopping function. It is the same developer as the awesome Reeder RSS app. Very nice design as well. Check it out and happy cooking!

srg0• 5 years ago

Suggestion: add a switch to convert American units (cups, lb, inches) to international units (ml, g, cm) and vice versa.

Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

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