Weird recipe pages that never give you the actual recipe 🤔

[BarrowInFurnessRailwayStation]

I'm just casually searching for a keto dessert and all the pages I'm clicking on have the same annoying and pointless format.

Lots of pictures of desserts.

Descriptions of the dessert and how wonderful it is.

Descriptions of the ingredients.

Other random non relevant information and ramblings such as how someone's sister ate the dessert whilst visiting their aunt one summer.

Loads of annoying pop up ads.

Scroll to the bottom and then......nothing. No ingredient list, quantities, method etc. Or if there is it's brief and you could never make anything.

Okaaay, so are these pages just to collect clicks for ad revenue, data harvesting or what? There are even options to sign up to newsletters, but why would anyone do that when the pages deliver nothing at all?

Am I missing something?

Oh I absolutely hate this! So frustrating. It's to do with search engine optimisation, I believe.

This meme always makes me laugh.

It drives me absolutely fucking crackers, particularly really simple recipes where you do not need chapter and verse on what butter is

Gives me the rage!

YANBU
Although a lot of these pages have a teeny little link that takes you straight to the recipe, if you don't fancy reading their huge backstory and seeing pictures of their garden.

Omg I can't stand it! They piss me off so much. The other thing they sometimes do is put the ingredients list separately to the instructions so that you have to keep scrolling up and down the page past the ads For this reason I just use BBC Good Food website and my recipe books! I have no time for stupid annoying blogs.

I also don't trust the recipes on there. They often say things like "I've just got home and quickly invented this and it's hands down the most delicious chocolate cake anyone has ever made in the whole world ever!!"

It's usually somewhere at the bottom but you have to look very very carefully.
Although I don't doubt there's even worse ones which don't even have it!!
Do you have a link OP? Wanna challenge myself

@MoonSpoonSoon

Omg I can't stand it! They piss me off so much. The other thing they sometimes do is put the ingredients list separately to the instructions so that you have to keep scrolling up and down the page past the ads For this reason I just use BBC Good Food website and my recipe books! I have no time for stupid annoying blogs. I also don't trust the recipes on there. They often say things like "I've just got home and quickly invented this and it's hands down the most delicious chocolate cake anyone has ever made in the whole world ever!!"

I don't trust the reviews either.... "I didn't have any chickpeas so I used courgette instead, and it tasted like arse".

If it doesn't have a Jump To Recipe button... bye bye.

Hate anything with cups rather than precise quantities

If its not on the BBC Food, I'm not making it

Yes annoying and just another version of clickbait. I also hate those video recipes that take about 5 minutes to show you how to make something like a burrito that looks really nice, but there's no easy way of finding out what goes into the special tasty burrito filling.

Or those stupid snapshots of text conversations on FB that show you half of something really interesting but when you click through, there's about 30 quite dull ones and the full explanation of the funny/interesting one just isn't there.

The most annoying thing is that there will be people who do this for a living and make good money out of getting people to click on pointless shit.

So it seems it's a thing. Interesting. I wonder why they don't actually put the recipe at the end though. It wouldn't cost them anything. They've conned people into clicking onto the page so why not put the recipe?

I'll try and find a link.

They do it so that you get exposed to lots of ads. It's how they make their money.

“ People ask this rhetorically, but there’s an easy answer: Recipes are a commodity; you can copy them as soon as you have the text. And Google’s search engine algorithm penalizes sites whose content duplicates other sites while rewarding sites with original content and a trusted brand name. So the competition in recipes is to either be a beloved site with short blurbs, or be a less reputable site with longer ones.”

onezero.medium.com/war-peace-bacon-eggs-understanding-the-endless-recipe-site-preamble-a890b3c55ad

@NoToAdolfPutler thank you for that link. I think I might finally have an answer. It's been bugging me for several years now.

I’ve normally either died of boredom or become so frustrated that I risk hurling whichever device I’m on looking for such recipe into the preheating oven.

I don’t care that you once ate hummus in a yurt.

I don’t care that your friend Barbara’s sister’s gerbil’s milkman once ate hummus with Bruno Brookes at a charity dance to raise money for Venusian Dung Beetles in Accrington.

I just want the hummus recipe.*

It’s like Tumblr in 2012 mated with Buzzfeed & birthed this weird, blogger abomination of smug, self congratulatory reminiscing guff adorned by art-sy pics (always with bunting lurking on the periphery) & click bait ads for life insurance, some mass produced & polyester fast fashion store or Audible. Always ruddy Audible.

If you ever do keep the will to live, you’ll scroll down to see that while most of the hummus recipe is pretty normal, it will contain a single rare & precious ingredient, like the breath of a blue tit, or magpie armpit, to complete (and which you’ll never find in your local Asda, Aldi or similar). And you know that the blogger is just tinkly laughing as they write it.

Unfortunately this web hellscape has expanded to include some of my favourite haunts; crochet, embroidery and all craft blogs are bedazzled by the twinkly laughing bunting Mavens, cramming in every pence of Adsense real estate so the bloody things don’t make any bloody sense anymore.

*I know how to make hummus. I make a lovely hummus. I’d give everyone the recipe except Sainsbo’s had run out of rat’s foreskin last night which (tinkly laugh) just makes the hummus just sooooo authentic, yeah?

Yup BBC recipes all the way !

Jane's Patisserie site pleases me. You can have all the blurb if you like it. Or just 'jump straight to recipe'!

I don't care how you came up with it. I don't want a backstory about a fucking cake. That's your whimsy, keep it for your personal audience because the rest of us aren't tearing up over your bad boss cake story. Just give me the recipe and the temperature and timings and piss off.

Upon further investigation it seems that there is usually a box cunningly hidden somewhere that, if you click on it, will take you to the recipe, ingredient list and method 🤔

Now all I have to do is figure out what American cup measurements are all about 🤪

It's especially annoying when you want to cook something the same day. You've got mince and spinach that needs using up, you google mince and spinach recipes. You find one, then have to wade through loads of irrelevant information to finally find that the recipe needs cauliflower and tamarind as well, which you don't have.

@BarrowInFurnessRailwayStation

Upon further investigation it seems that there is usually a box cunningly hidden somewhere that, if you click on it, will take you to the recipe, ingredient list and method 🤔

Now all I have to do is figure out what American cup measurements are all about 🤪

A lot of them will have a little thing at the top of the recipe box you can click to change the measurements from imperial to metric to get mls/grams rather than cups.

XenoBitch
You should have a look at this subreddit; www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/

@veronicagoldberg, that meme is spot on 🤣🤣

@woodhill

Hate anything with cups rather than precise quantities

Cups are precise measurements

You can easily get conversion charts for both dry weights and liquids.

Example
www.amazon.co.uk/Kitchen-Conversion-Chart-Magnet-Measurements/dp/B08GC9ZTVF?tag=mumsnetforu03-21