The fault in Google's stars
In this week's edition: papal butt pics, Pavement B-sides, recipe site hijinks, Canadian children, AI faces and turn-off-your-brain kinda memes
Links is a free weekly newsletter with a simple premise: I read tons of stuff on the internet, and this is the best of it. You can hit reply to send your own links. You can also follow me on Twitter. And if you want to support the newsletter, please tell your friends. Or enemies, really! I take all comers.
🚨 IMPORTANT: 🚨 Links will undergo some changes in the new year, and I’m surveying readers to help guide its direction. It’d be really, tremendously helpful to me if you could fill out this brief Google Form at your convenience. Thank you!
It was a tweak to the interface so small, so benign, that only search-engine marketers noticed, at first. Ten years ago this year, Google rolled out an update to its “rich snippets” program that let food sites boast their recipes’ ratings right within search.
No more clicking through infinite variations on mushroom lasagna, hoping to find the most popular one. No more squinting over author names and publication titles, debating the comparative deliciousness of Ina Garten vs. Sarah Jampel vs. Martha Rose Schulman. Now, when you search “one-pot easy vegan gluten-free paleo pasta” — a search that does, somehow, surface results? — you immediately see the dish the internet rates highest. Looks like this weird thing. Five stars!!
The problem with Google’s star system, however, is that these ratings don’t actually tell you anything about the relative quality of the recipe in question. I find myself thinking about this every year around this time, when my mom and I begin the time-honored ritual of fiercely debating what new holiday recipes to try before … defaulting to my dad’s favorites.
There’s no standard, no central rubric, no rules to Google stars; the ratings don’t even come through Google — they’re supplied by the sites themselves. Recipe sites “live and die” by rich snippets; often, those stars are the only reason anybody clicks. In the first year Food.com added ratings to its Google recipe results, they almost doubled the site’s recipe traffic.
It follows, then, that some recipe sites might want to game the great Google traffic-getting system. In fact, an entire micro-industry has popped up to help food sites “optimize” their Google snippets, from better structuring their data to … deleting or changing recipe ratings as they see fit.
For years, I’ve wondered which ones actually do it. (All of them??) You figure that, seedy SEO hacks aside, some variation also inevitably comes down to the culture of the comment section.
Martha Stewart’s recipes, for instance, rarely score higher than a 4 out of 5, but I think that’s because her readers are actually really harsh. Food.com ratings, in my experience, also skew far higher than they objectively deserve: You should be automatically disqualified from earning five stars if your dish contains three ingredients and one is store-bought. But I put that down less to trickery and more to my (condescending, possibly wrong?) belief that Food.com ranks mainly with the Midwest casserole crowd. A New York 6 is a Scranton 7, etc. etc.
There is one site, however, whose ratings I find … truly and universally suspicious. I came to this conclusion after a wildly unscientific experiment in which I pulled the scores for 30 random recipes from 12 of the internet’s most popular food publications. Bon Appetit averaged 4.2 stars across the field. New York Times’ Cooking earned 4.5. But Simply Recipes — “wholesome scratch cooking recipes that work!” — absolutely cleaned house with an average score of 4.9 stars. Just doesn’t feel right.
Alas, I’m sending this edition later than I planned, so if your Thanksgiving sources from Simply Recipes, there’s not much time to course correct!! Just drink more wine and remember next year will be better, in all respects.
There’s no newsletter this Friday — I plan to be hungover — but I’m wishing you all relaxing, safe and stay-at-home Thanksgivings. See you in December! (Holy shit, right? It is indeed almost December already…)
If you read anything this weekend
This parable of the inherent problems in Big Tech’s guiding philosophy. At its face, this is an anxiety-inducing first-person essay on living with an implanted, hackable ICD. But it’s also about risk, agency, technological “progress” and the forces drawing the new bounds of all three. [Jameson Rich / OneZero]
This fortuitous pair of features on how technology literally changed the way we see ourselves. I love that these came out in the same week, and would really recommend reading them together. The first will take you from the dawn of creation to the invention of the mirror (and later, the selfie). The second will bring you current with the latest in a line of “self-presentation technologies.” I for one envy this medieval world where no one knew what they looked like. Now I’m expected to shell out $50 for a ring light (?!). [Clive Thompson / Smithsonian Magazine & Amanda Mull / The Atlantic]
This fun/fascinating disentanglement of a longtime Spotify mystery. Namely: Why is Pavement’s top song on the streaming platform an obscure B-side from the late ‘90s? The answer — which has also impacted other artists — illustrates just how unintended algorithmic consequences can be. [Nate Rogers / Stereogum]
This New York Times interactive on AI-generated faces, which is so intensely cool I don’t think I have to sell it. Good week for NYT tech stunts! They also had GPT-3 write some Modern Loves. [Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White / New York Times]
And now for something completely different
I very rarely say this, but: read the comments
Postscripts
Wonk rock. Hyperpop. “Going back to brunch.” The addictive power of Facebook groups and popular “facts” that actually aren’t. Who liked this butt pic from the pope’s Instagram? And when did Instagram become QVC? I know they’re children, but let’s relish, just a little!!, this momentary backlash against TikTok’s most famous teens.
The problem with that very viral nurse’s Twitter thread. The reason I’ll be buying Behr paint from now on. Who among us has never Zillow-surfed?? (Though doing it somewhere you’ll never live feels kinda sad/self-defeating/odd.) The dark art of winning at Scrabble. A weird legal frontier for streamers. Last but not least, this is the “year of ‘turn off your brain’ kinda memes” — that’s one way to put it!
Sharing is caring
I like that this tweet uses the phrase “post-haste,” which most people don’t use often enough, and also that it qualifies what might otherwise be absurd/hyperbolic praise with a handy modifier (“probably” — how measured!!). Aaron is clearly a reasonable and level-headed person with excellent taste … so THANK YOU to Aaron & everyone else who shares this newsletter. Your referrals are the main way it finds new readers!!
— Caitlin