[WorldMaker]

Personally, I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that Google killed the Recipe Databases. There did used to be a few startups that tried to be Recipe Aggregators with advertising based business models, that would show recipes and then link to source blogs and/or cookbooks, and in the brief period where they existed Google scraped them entirely and showed entire recipes on search results and ate their ad revenue out from under them.

[dspillett]

Such databases would get battered by demands to remove content these days, if not already back then. No one want a database listing their stuff for ad revenue like that because many wouldn't follow the links so see their adverts or be subject to their tracking.

A couple of browser add-ons specifically geared around trimming recipe pages down have been taken down due to similar complaints.

[tomrod]

That is a really bad thing by Google. Their core business is not recipes.

[kwertyoowiyop]

Their core business is making money from other people’s content, no matter what it is.

[WorldMaker]

Their core business is advertising and they have always been in a direct conflict-of-interest by competing with content sites for ad revenue buys.