I'd love improved search and I'd also love it if they'd close ancient hotline threads (have them still searchable, but no new posts added). Annoyed by 5 year old threads coming up and answering them before I notice.
The merchandise posts bother me less than all the irrelevant lifestyle advice. But maybe the target audience can't figure out where to find that information but on a food site - the logical place to look for it LOL. Who knows. Someone's clicking on those posts, or they'd discontinue them.
Yup, it seems the search engine is optimized for contest winners, finalists and community picks (?) --if using precise wording, other recipes don't come up (based on a quick attempt using my submitted recipes at least).
Yes! The search engine is off the rails! It is optimized for some different purpose. If you search for a recipe by its exact title, the search engine instead pushes a whole bunch of other recipes first and prioritizes them by some unknown and useless metric.
I wish the search engine worked better. When I look for Cranberry Biscotti I don't want a recipe for Thanksgiving Osso Buco (even if it MAY have cranberries in it).
Can't reply to cv but agree with the stuff popping up that I really don't need. Looked up MY recipe for my Fluffy Scones. After closing it I went back to the food 52 homepage and there were all these recipes for scones! I didn't want those I only wanted to put something on mine and I agree with all the promotions for products ASAP saying they're helpful after closing it I went back to the Food52 homepage and they're all these recipes for scones! I didn't want those I only wanted to put something on mine.
Personally, I think these changes detract considerably from the site- maybe you can't stop it, but you most certainly can't without mentioning it. Change of websites is not a law of nature, it's something that people do.
I forgot to mention how I compensate for this weird "here are all the recipes we think you like" behavior.
I am now using an alternate web browser in private mode to visit Food52. When I quit the private window, it deletes all web content (cookies, history, etc.) and thus resets my preferences to zero.
"f my case is typical, instead of a list of most recent articles you get a few recent articles at the top and a bunch of stuff that a computer (one that doesn't know me at all) thinks you might be interested in."
Yes, this happens to me as well. If I click on a carrot recipe, all of a sudden the homepage offers me a bunch of other carrot recipes which I find odd.
It would be like clicking on a news article about OPEC and then being served up nothing but oil & gas articles, stock quotes for ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Weatherford, offered futures contracts for Brent light crude oil, etc.
It's a strange way to serve readers but admittedly I am not part of Food52's prime demographic. Maybe they like that sort of stuff, who knows?
Well, Features still shows up in the top navigation bar.
There are other oddities. Gone is the ability to reply to a particular Hotline comment. The comments aren't threaded anymore so I can't reply directly to Smaug's comment for example. Everything is at the same level.
Thanks did not mean for this to become a diatribe on Food52 becoming a different type of site- I literally just saw today that I cannot find regular features, wondering if this has happened to anyone else and if there was any advance notice about it.
Yeah, it's been a while now. If my case is typical, instead of a list of most recent articles you get a few recent articles at the top and a bunch of stuff that a computer (one that doesn't know me at all) thinks you might be interested in. There are also a lot fewer food and cooking articles, and those are aimed mostly at the quick and easy crowd; a lot more decorating and cleaning articles, and a LOT of merchandise promotion.
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The merchandise posts bother me less than all the irrelevant lifestyle advice. But maybe the target audience can't figure out where to find that information but on a food site - the logical place to look for it LOL. Who knows. Someone's clicking on those posts, or they'd discontinue them.
I am now using an alternate web browser in private mode to visit Food52. When I quit the private window, it deletes all web content (cookies, history, etc.) and thus resets my preferences to zero.
Yes, this happens to me as well. If I click on a carrot recipe, all of a sudden the homepage offers me a bunch of other carrot recipes which I find odd.
It would be like clicking on a news article about OPEC and then being served up nothing but oil & gas articles, stock quotes for ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Weatherford, offered futures contracts for Brent light crude oil, etc.
It's a strange way to serve readers but admittedly I am not part of Food52's prime demographic. Maybe they like that sort of stuff, who knows?
There are other oddities. Gone is the ability to reply to a particular Hotline comment. The comments aren't threaded anymore so I can't reply directly to Smaug's comment for example. Everything is at the same level.
The only thing constant on the Internet is change.
Whether you like it or not, things won't always stay the same online. That's also mostly true for the real world as well.
New businesses open, old ones close. Puppies are born, old dogs die. That nice old oak tree gets split in two by a lightning bolt.
Such is life.
Voted the Best Reply!