A good essay, but I find it ironic that the author used “finding a recipe” as an example of the old web working well when recipe blogs are frequently the top example cited when someone is talking about SEO slop in the pre-AI web.
I always saw them as cited as ad ridden and the complexity of recipe copyright (you can copyright a story but not a recipe).
But I guess there’s a convergence in that the Google ad ecosystem relied on SEO nonsense and the quality varied pretty widely so some sites where just aggregated bad recipes optimised to get ad views.
There where enough real sites and the bad ones where easy enough to sniff out that it seemed a reasonable compromise at the time.
A good essay, but I find it ironic that the author used “finding a recipe” as an example of the old web working well when recipe blogs are frequently the top example cited when someone is talking about SEO slop in the pre-AI web.
I guess sort of.
I always saw them as cited as ad ridden and the complexity of recipe copyright (you can copyright a story but not a recipe).
But I guess there’s a convergence in that the Google ad ecosystem relied on SEO nonsense and the quality varied pretty widely so some sites where just aggregated bad recipes optimised to get ad views.
There where enough real sites and the bad ones where easy enough to sniff out that it seemed a reasonable compromise at the time.