Google ends recipe pilot that left creators fearing web-traffic hit

The Star

2 days ago

The company's retreat on the recipe feature comes amid a larger debate about whether the terms of engagement between the search giant and publishers should be renegotiated as generative AI remakes the web. — Pixabay
Google has ended tests of a feature that would have let users open a snapshot of cooking-recipe content directly in web search results – a welcome development for creators and food bloggers who were concerned about eroding traffic to their sites.
In recent months, Alphabet Inc-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers' content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.
Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial. "We continually experiment with ways to make it easier for people to find helpful information on Search,' a spokesperson for Google said in a statement. "Learnings from these experiments help to inform future development and efforts.'
The company's retreat on the recipe feature comes amid a larger debate about whether the terms of engagement between the search giant and publishers should be renegotiated as generative AI remakes the web.
Creators who depend on Google and other technology companies for traffic have spoken out about the devastating toll AI has taken on their businesses, and are pushing for more control over how their content is used to develop the technology. Cloudflare Inc, a web infrastructure and security company, on Tuesday announced a "pay per crawl' program that allows creators to bill AI services for access to their content.
"We have this ongoing standards conversation of how might a site say, 'I want you to do search but not generative AI training,'' said Derek Slater, co-founder of Proteus Strategies, a tech policy consulting firm. "Those are moving technological and market-driven pieces that have not settled yet.'
Creators who participated in the pilot with Google were being directly compensated, but not nearly enough to offset declines in their advertising revenue, Marc McCollum, chief growth officer at Raptive, told Bloomberg earlier this year. Raptive, a media company that represents creators, estimated that traffic to food blogs would fall by half if the feature were implemented in full.
Soon after news of the test program surfaced, creators made their concerns known, said Tomiko Harvey, a travel and food blogger at Passports and Grub, who attended a Google creator summit in May.
"I'm actually feeling hopeful about this decision from Google,' Harvey wrote in an email. "Canceling the Quick View Recipe feature feels like a rare but welcome acknowledgment that creator feedback matters.'
Although Google's decision has some creators feeling relief, they likely haven't seen the last of the search giant's experimentation in a vibrant corner of the web. In recent years, many food bloggers have padded their recipes with lengthy preambles to ensure their content ranks well in Google Search, irritating readers in the process.
As it crawls the web, Google will glean information about recipes' core principles – say, the basic proportions of broth and meat in a recipe for chicken noodle soup – which it can then use to inform its own answers, Slater said.
"Recipes are, by definition, facts, and facts are not copyrightable,' Slater said. For Google, "there's always going to be a tension between giving the user exactly what they want,' he added, "and directing the user to another site.' – Bloomberg