Google's just quietly introduced a very useful piece of functionality called 'Reading level' which is available from the advanced menu:
When you choose the option as you can see it's possible to choose from different reading levels for your results. This is obviously useful when working with children, or if you're an advanced searcher or expert in a particular field you're not going to want to be bothered with basic material. The SERPS page looks like this:
It's therefore quite easy to see the level of the page that's being returned in the results and you can obviously click on basic, intermediate or advanced to limit the results. Of course, what you can also do is to check a particular website and see how much of it is at one level or another, by using the site: feature, as here:
It's an interesting concept. Apparently Google got a bunch of teachers together and showed them different web pages and got them to rank them appropriately, and then they worked whatever Googlemagic they do and worked out some algorythms to grade all pages. Of course Google isn't going to be telling us how these work, or exactly how they're defining the criteria in any sort of detail.The most that I've found so far is a brief 'help' page about it.
I think there is a danger here though, since I'm wondering at the extent to which 'basic' is going to be associated with 'stupid'. After all if you consider it, writing something about a complex scientific study in language that everyone can understand is going to be quite a feat. I think it's going to be important to be clear that just because a page is 'basic' doesn't mean that it's going to be simplistic.If we're answering questions for people who come into the library this is going to lead to some interesting discussions when pulling up results for people 'Now, do you want basic material, or are you going to go straight for the advanced stuff?' Difficult call.
I also wonder how many people are going to run a search on their own site, panic when they see all their material is graded as 'basic' and think that they have to rewrite it.
We can have some interesting fun with this tool though. How are most English languages pages graded you may wonder:
How about pitting different page gradings for stars against each other? How about a fight between Humphrey Bogart andJustin Bieber?
How about some newspapers?
Daily Mail: basic 32%, intermediate 66% advanced <1%
The Sun: basic 60%, intermediate 39%, advanced <1%
The Guardian: basic 29%, intermediate 66%, advanced 3% (The quick witted will see that this doesn't actually add up to 100%, so where the other 2% has disappeared to is a good question!)
This gets addictive very quickly.
The CILIP site: basic 3%, intermediate 83%, advanced 12% (Again, the missing magical 2%!)
American Library Association: basic 16%, intermediate 71%, advanced 11% (plus the missing 2% which seems be something of a trend at the moment.)
Now - does this mean that British Librarians have a better 'reading age' or reading ability than our American cousins? No, of course it doesn't. But you can see how quickly the game becomes quite competitive and how quickly it could lead to entirely erroneous conclusions.
We can play the game further as well - Google now gives us the opportunity of breaking down words into basic, intermediate and advanced. We've already seen that the word 'the' is pretty evenly spread between basic and intermediate. What about 'sophisticated'? Here we have basic 3%, intermediate 48% and advanced 47%. So if you're described as sophisticated that's probably quite a good thing, but if you're being described as posh - basic 45%, intermediate 48% and advanced 6%. Of course, it might just mean that if you're hanging around with people who think you're posh, maybe you're spending time with the wrong crowd? On the other hand, it probably means absolutely nothing of the sort, and I'm now delving into silliness (basic 53%, intermediate 42%, advanced 3%) or surrealism (basic 38%, intermediate 48%, advanced 13%) as I prefer to think of it, naturally.
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