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| Thu Dec 23 20:41:41 2010 Google's Reading Level |
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| Thu Dec 23 20:41:41 2010 Google's Reading Level Playing with Google's latest feature |
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| Recently
Google announced that they now support
filtering search results by reading level.
Of course, if they support filtering by reading level, that means they must be classifying content based on reading level. And that gets pretty interesting! To use the new filtering, you can just go to their Advanced Search page, and use the "Reading level:" drop down. The best setting to start is "annotate results with reading levels." Of course, I first tried searching for Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart. However, they were pretty much tied. Websites mentioning Glenn Beck were 37% Basic, 55% Intermediate, and 7% Advanced. Websites mentioning Jon Stewart were 36% Basic, 51% Intermediate, and 11% Advanced. There is probably a lot of cross-pollination: people that love Glenn Beck probably mention (and curse) Jon Stewart on their websites, and vice-versa. So their numbers will mostly be the same. Oddly, the first "Basic" reading level result for Jon Stewart is his own website. However, other searches show bigger differences. I love Eminem, but websites mentioning him are a staggering 94% Basic, 4% Intermediate, and less than 1% Advanced (somehow the math adds up for Google). On the other end of the spectrum, Wittgenstein websites are 13% Basic, 28% Intermediate, and 58% Advanced. But Wittgenstein has sold far fewer albums. You can use the filters to find some good stuff. For instance, a search for Harvey Wallbanger results in almost no Advanced-level hits. But if you filter for Advanced results anyway, you get some great hits, like the first hit: In Search of the Optimum Harvey Wallbanger Recipe, which as far as I can tell is a legitimate article published in 1987 in The American Statistician, a serious quarterly peer-reviewed journal focused on (duh) statistics. Sadly, you can only view the first page. The abstract says "The results of the experiment indicate that reducing the proportion of vodka produces better-flavored results." But if you want further details you'll need to subscribe to the journal. 
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