HN Explorer

Rule of Thumb: Anything that looks fancy is not worth you time

37 points by andrei-akopian ↗ HN
I recently saw the tip to add "before:2023" to google search queries and it gives significantly better results. I would like to explain my mentality about "trends" and encourage others to act the same.

With SEO optimization and psychological tricks that websites and advertisers attract you to their shitty content. I have subconsciously learned to have a negative reaction to all of them.

Same for a news articles and ads.

A website is BS if it has any of the following: - More than a paragraph of introduction - Word "AI" in the title - Doesn't have sentences without buzzwords - Ads with Psychological tricks

Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.

Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.

Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.

Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.

If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.

Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better. And I will be arrogant and say that my rant here meets that criteria.

23 comments

[ 725 ms ] story [ 1532 ms ] thread
hackernoteng
The SEO has ruined the internet. Now every recipe web site has 5000 words of narrative before the actual recipe (at least now they all have "jump to recipe" buttons). I really dont care to read 5000 word essay on your families history how your grandma made it every summer, etc. They all do this because the AI/SEO wont return their site I guess?
JohnFen
I think they do it because you can't copyright a recipe, so if copyright is important to you then you need to add other creative aspects to the recipe that can be copyrighted.
is_true
It was (is) just a seo tactic to have more keywords and better long tail traffic.
al_borland
If their goal was to get more people to the site, and coming back to use it regularly… they’d make the site quick and easy to use with useful features.

Instead, they add all this stuff for SEO reasons. If they can be at the top of Google, they don’t have to worry about people coming back in their own, Google will keep sending them over.

In an age where few people use bookmarks anymore, many sites rely on SEO get regular traffic.

Then, of course, the other half is stuff to monetize the site. Ads, newsletter sign up modals, tracking cookies and the warnings that come with them, registration prompts, etc.

ranger_danger
> In an age where few people use bookmarks anymore, many sites rely on SEO get regular traffic.

I don't follow the logic here. Are you saying you believe that traffic to websites has significantly declined because they don't use bookmarks? But if they're searching for the site and click on it, that's still traffic to you either way. The alternative would be that they couldn't find it and gave up, which I also find unlikely if they were someone who already knew about it to begin with (as one of the "bookmark" people).

> If their goal was to get more people to the site, and coming back to use it regularly… they’d make the site quick and easy to use with useful features.

Are you sure that SEO doesn't derive WAY more traffic than a small optimized page? I think the vast majority of the world population simply doesn't care about that.

al_borland
My thought was that when people are looking for a recipe for apple pie, they aren't going to their favorite recipe website and searching for apple pie. They are going to google and typing in "apple pie recipe". Whatever site is on top is the one they go to. SEO wins out over a quality site a user wants to go back to. I'm pretty sure my dad has actually talked up a new dish he made for the holidays by saying it was the #1 result on Google for whatever the dish was. He equated being the top result with highest quality and best tasting.

This is my theory anyway, based on how I see people doing stuff these days. I don't have any hard data on this.

Without SEO, back in the era of bookmarks, I think people would bookmark sites they enjoyed using and wanted to come back to. If the site was hard to use and littered with ads, it wouldn't get bookmarked and get a repeat visit. At least that's how I did it. Maybe I'm not normal in that respect.

rimunroe
> I think they do it because you can't copyright a recipe, so if copyright is important to you then you need to add other creative aspects to the recipe that can be copyrighted.

I hear this claimed a lot but I don't think it's true. I'm not a lawyer, but everything I've read indicates you can't turn a recipe itself into a literary work (and thus make it copyrightable) just by surrounding it with prose, or even by representing it in a novel fashion (as a poem). You can always extract the guts of the recipe (the sequence of steps and ingredients) and share that. I believe this is part of why food companies often carefully guard their recipes.

tzs
I think the idea is that extracting the actual non-copyrightable recipe from the page is harder if it is in the midst of copyrightable stuff, which might give you some legal recourse against sites that just copy the whole page.
verzali
Do recipes make up a substantial part of your internet searches? I ask because I rarely search for recipes outside of a few trusted sites, and because cook books are still thing.
portaouflop
In my case they do.

But I just use reader mode on basically all websites and that makes skipping the fluff trivial.

Goes for all other websites too - reader mode + ublock origin makes the modern internet bearable.

cableshaft
We use them all the time. We have a Google Sheets with a meal plan that includes links to each of the recipes we use.

Although I guess we only had to search for them on the internet one time for that. Whenever we look for new recipes though, we do.

We also have our own printed out cookbook of some of those recipes, but we often remove the active recipe from the binder, so some get lost or shifted around, and it's not kept up to date at all, etc, so it's often just easier to use the links.

philipbjorge
Keep an eye out for the "Jump to Recipe" button found on most sites. (It's still terrible UX IMO, but figured I'd share the above tip as it's saved me some frustration)
lakomen
Heh. Just yesterday I have released a cooking recipe site, which I made for my 89 year old mom, where she can post her recipes, or rather me with her, in a simple way. Only ingredients and preparation sections exist as well as the ability to upload images.

At first I wanted to write it just for her, but then I thought, why not make it multi-user?

It's a MVP and I have just found a bug, can't edit the recipe language. I also need to add German and Serbo-Croatian translations.

There are no ads (for now, and should there be any, they will be minimal) and no nag screens, no tracking or other hostile bs.

What I find annoying when searching for a recipe it what you wrote, a huge initial wall of text about their ancestors and whatever, but before you can even read it, you have to either click through at least 1 cookie wall and sometimes even accept tracking or pay up.

Frontend Vue with Quasar, backed Go.

https://cooksbooks.de

No, it's not a site about how to cook your books ;) All the good domains were taken. Also it's a good way to remember this non-standard domain. A play store twa is currently under review. But even should it not be accepted, the website will remain.

I'm currently having issues with keycloak and PWA mode, so it's a SPA with a manifest.json and no service workers.

JohnFen
This tracks well with my approach, too. I've generalized it a bit more these days, though. If something looks very polished/glitzy, my instinct is to think that it's probably junk. I picked up this instinct through experience on the web and with modern applications, but have increasingly found it works reasonably well in the real world, too.
xboxnolifes
I'm the same. There's some sort of Goldilocks middle ground of visual quality that is my instinctual tell for good quality. Very polished tends to be a polished turd and no quality is just a turd. However, there is a fine line where, when you see it, you just know it's likely exactly what you want.
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insane_dreamer
“AI-powered” is an immediate skip for me as well whether it be a news article or product ad.
chrismcb
Two facts per ten word sentence? That seems fairly dense and I'm guessing probably not a fun read. I guess it depends on what you are describing. But I works question the grammar of a site that packs so much information in such terse sentences
tudorconstantin
I read some time ago on twitter something along the lines of “if you run enough A/B tests, you’ll end up with a porn website” and I guess that’s what the future of high-engagement-web reserves us