Whenever I look for recipes online I feel the strong urge to post a rant very much like this, so I'm happy to share this instead as it saves me a ton of writing, and I'll just add a few thoughts of my own.
https://bruceblog.bearblog.dev/oncookingsites/
I'm not so much bothered by the flood of ads and videos as that can be easily fixed with an adblocker. What I can't wrap my head around is how Google very visibly makes the web a worse place, forcing people to fill it with tons of SEO bullshit to please Google's algorithm (if they care to be found that is). Recipe sites make this painfully visible. Every recipe these days comes with one or two pages of SEO bollocks you gotta skip through to get to the recipe. I assume they're mostly AI generated slop these days and I can't even blame them for saving themselves some work as no one's ever gonna read that shit anyways, besides Google's crawlers. The readers know it's bullshit, people even made browser add-ons that remove the garbage and/or extract/scrape the recipe part somehow. The creators know it's bullshit and you'll find a "jump to recipe" (or rather "skip the bullshit") button at the top of most recipe pages these days. Google (most likely) is aware that this is bullshit, however they have no urge whatsoever to improve their search as they know websites gotta cater to their crap algorithms if they want to exist. So instead of Google fixing it (which they easily could), everyone just plays along and finds their own ways to cope and work around Google, be it with browser add-ons or "skip the SEO trash that's here solely because Google demands it" buttons. It's just sad.
As for the rest of the post: amen!
PS: Thanks to @kagihq for their "small web", I most certainly would never have come across this post otherwise.
#recipes #google #seo #smallweb #kagi