In the modern age, SEO is partially to blame for inaccurate recipe cook times. At some point Google realized that folks would click on more recipes with shorter times, as people would use that as a metric when cooking. So they would promote quicker recipes.
What ended up happening is some recipe developers would try and actually reduce the amount of time their recipe took, and others would just "shorten" prep (or even cook) time down, to try and get the most clicks. I know Kenji talks about it in one of his POV videos, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.
Since there isn't really a reliable way to know how long recipes would take for _you_ across different sites, it's almost not a useful metric, but it is what's been optimized for.
Yeah, that's the typo detection in search. The key thing is that "Natto" is prioritized, so that part is working correctly!
Tweaking search can be a whole full time thing. I'll write it down and maybe look into if I can tweak the search so if there are exact matches to not show alternatives.
Yeah, that was part of the long term monetization plan. Paid for user accounts ($3ish/month) that allow people to clip recipes, view previews, discuss, modify, and share.
Never quite got around to it unfortunately, as I wanted more users before new features.
I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search.
So from an individual developer perspective, it's very hard to get people to change their habits. And Google/duck/Bing is the one stop shop.
It's still out there, but I haven't worked on it much lately. I always think that if I had some good advertisers, a better UI, and a salary coming in, maybe it could take over some of Google's usage!
What ended up happening is some recipe developers would try and actually reduce the amount of time their recipe took, and others would just "shorten" prep (or even cook) time down, to try and get the most clicks. I know Kenji talks about it in one of his POV videos, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.
Since there isn't really a reliable way to know how long recipes would take for _you_ across different sites, it's almost not a useful metric, but it is what's been optimized for.