Issues with Google searching recipes

Has anyone else had issues with google searching recipes? I have noticed this for a while and just thought it was a fluke. But today, I am trying to make pickles and all the recipes that show up are less than 10 reviews on a random blog I’ve never heard of…popular recipes like ball jar, nchfp, Mrs wages, etc…none of them show up unless I specifically search for it.

This isn’t limited to pickling either, the other day I made chicken piccata and it was the same thing - usually popular sites like allrecipes.com show up for the first several search results and have thousands of reviews.

Has anyone else experienced this or know of a setting that causes this to happen? Should I use a different search engine?

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Not that everyone here uses AI. I use Gemini and then ask for sources to be cited. I find this to be quicker and more effective as a tool than reading people's life story about a recipe..

Use Duck Duck Go instead. More accurate. And no AI.

google has gotten weirdly good at serving seo sludge instead of the obvious answer, so i usually search the exact site or add “reddit” and ignore the first page entirely lol

Jesus Christ. How many different times and ways do the contributors to these subs need to tell y'all that random Google searches are not the way?

For pickles of all things you should not be trusting the goddamn algorithm.

If you're going to make pickles pour yourself a tall beer, take off your pants, and sit down to study the source.

After that, it's the same list as always. I'm getting tired of posting it: America's Test kitchen, Serious Eats, NYT, Alton motherfucking Brown, and maybe other sites if they come highly recommend by numerous people on these subs or by people you know can make the food you're interested in.

I use Google but include the word reddit in the search. I get a reddit thread with great recipies and links!

Yeah I’m familiar w nchfp, which is why I mentioned it in the post…I didn’t want a recipe w sugar and damn near all their recipes have an excessive amount, so I was looking for alternatives online…my question is more related to the content of the google search results than where to look.

I use chat gpt for recipes and then I tweek my ask to "make it restaurant quality." and it has been terrific.

Yeah, I’ve noticed more and more that google recipe searches are showing me random blogs and sites that I’ve never seen before in my life.

Like sure, I have my usual go to trusted sites, bloggers, and YouTube channels, but sometimes I just want to get a bigger sense of how people make a particular dish, and google will be like “here’s a recipe with 5 stars and 2.5k reviews, written two days ago by a Ukrainian woman you’ve never seen mentioned on the internet on how to make Japanese curry”.

Sorry, that feels sus to me.

The algorithms change. I don't know why sites we never heard of are prioritized suddenly but I agree. Paywalled sites are dropping off and reputable ones are too.

There is some info here that covers more than recipes and feels credible.

https://writersguide.substack.com/p/the-end-of-google-search-as-we-knew

Yeah, its been a while since Google did not suck. Remember when it was near-revolutionary? They are already making money off my data, why not put the search engine back the way it was?

If someone created a cooking search website where the search engine only pulled from a list of approved sources, like the ones you name plus some established other recommended creators, I think it would be very popular. It could be members only, and the members could vote on which sites are pulled from. It could also get all revenue from memberships, with zero sponsored ads. No more search results full of hits from cutsiedownhomebullshit.com.

Damn, I gotta write this down...