Slashdot Mirror
'Reading Level' Filter Added To Google Search
entotre writes "A new feature has been added to the advanced Google search: reading level. From the blog post: 'The feature lets you filter or annotate the search results by reading level. The reading levels include basic, intermediate and advanced. You can either have Google label or annotate the results with those labels, only show basic results, only show intermediate results or only show advanced results.' At the time of writing, Slashdot is 1 % advanced, 64 % intermediate and 34 % basic."
f1r5t p05t!
How am I supposed to choose the correct filter when I don't know what the word "intermediate" means?!
[insert obvious dragon ball joke here]
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=images&tbs=rl%3A1&q=site%3Asimple.wikipedia.org&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= Basic 28% Intermediate 55% Advanced 16% I think someone didn't live up to his claims!
I think this service drastically overestimates the reading level of the average Google user, specifically with regard to the comprehension of words like "intermediate."
99% advanced. On the other hand, Wikipedia is quite evenly distributed.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Anyone who's been in school or has kids in school, knows just how useless the reading level is. It's a useless measurement.
Farther proof that Google and tehir world tubes is help making us all geniusii!
I thought /. would be 0% advanced, 0% intermediate, 0% basic, and 100% kindergarten...
/me ducks
Palm trees and 8
Everyone sound smart!
Derrida began speaking and writing publicly at a time when the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly be called "phenomenological" and "structural" approaches to understanding individual and collective life. For those with a more phenomenological bent the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a problematic and misleading avenue of interrogation, and the "depth" and originality of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. It is in this context that in 1959 Derrida asks the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructionism#Theory)
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
The Reading Level for site:simple.wikipedia.org is currently ranked 29% Basic, 52% Intermediate, 17% Advanced, implying that Slashdot is easier to read than the version of Wikipedia specifically tasked with being approachable to those with only basic English language comprehension. Google's filter fails here, though I suspect Wikipedia is failing to a small degree too.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I have a feeling most sites I frequent are going to fall into the "intermediate" category, though from a SEO perspective you typically want to keep your site content basic and easy to understand. Obviously a site dedicated to molecular physics would require pages that should probably be classified as "advanced" but not every page on the site would, so unless Google is planning on adding more site links to each domain they show in search results, I don't see how this will result in accurate listings or ultimately even add any benefit to search in general. But kudo's to thinking outside the box and testing it on the masses.
Ave Molech Setting
"Slashdot is 1 % advanced, 64 % intermediate and 34 % basic."
I think it's broken.
Finally, I can just set Google to "filter everything below a third grade level" and never have to see 'Yahoo! Answers' spam cluttering up my search results!
-aliterate
Slashdot editors can search the internet and actually understand the results! :p
28% advanced for middle school math, and16% advanced for college math. So.. math somehow gets less 'advanced' from middle school to college?
In a shock to nobody, Googling for 'Kanye West' clocks in with 94% basic and 1% advanced. Beat that, slashdot!
Think Liberals are the learned elite and Conservatives are intellectually bankrupt? Think again:
FoxNews.com:
Basic: 23%
Intermediate: 73%
Advanced: 2%
MSNBC.com:
Basic: 43%
Intermediate: 55%
Advanced: 1%
Win = conservatives.
My quest for advanced level porn brought me here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_outer_retinal_necrosis :(
That's great and all, but what would be *really* cool, is if Google provided some way to search for pages that contain a specific word or phrase. Yeah, that would be cool. Some kind of search engine where I type in words and the search engine returns only pages that contain those words. Can Google work on that next?
So I think you are in part correct that the simple site isn't living up to its name--it takes a lot of effort to dumb stuff down. However, when you look at the "advanced" pages you start to realize how certain material gets categorized that way: scientific words and pages with primarily people of place names.
The other problem is that it's doing it based on volume of pages. The simple site actually has relatively few number of pages in total thereby more heavily increasing the "advanced" pages.
Finally, just to be clear, it doesn't seem to be computing the percentage of content, but rather what percentage of pages (in total) fall into one or the other category.
Level Basic/Intermediate/Advanced
MSNBC 44/55/<1
CNN 27/70/2
Fox News 23/73/2
So it's a "brightness control" that allows you to turn down the intelligence?
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
The low rating really reflects the number of ignorant 4chan high schoolers and CS majors that post flamebait to this site.
Will it restrict the type or porn I find?
I'm not sure I'm into the advanced stuff, but I certainly do not want to get stuck in the basics. Missionary style for 10 years while married is enough for me.
Results by reading level for site:127.0.0.1:
Basic 8%
Intermediate 75%
Advanced 16%
Results by reading level for site:localhost:
Basic 19%
Intermediate 79%
Advanced 1%
They already have that option, but it's labeled Images.
Good point. :)
Is that for results that all start with the same sound?
This space intentionally left blank.
I reckon I have advanced english, intermediate french & basic spanish & german...
Fox News
23% Basic
73% Intermediate
2% Advanced
aliterate/litrit/
Noun: An aliterate person.
Adjective: Unwilling to read, although able to do so
I believe he meant illiterate though which is unable to read rather than unwilling to.
I'm fed up reading about feet, inches and other body parts as measures, but temperature and derived units (like "mpg") are the most annoying.
Google! Do something! (to be read in a certain villain voice)
Please! Onegai shimasu!
Maybe soon Google can cater to the truly stupid and illiterate and just replace all known words with representative pictures like they do on McDonalds cash registers now.
After all, instead of learning to read at a better level you should totally cater to their level so they don't have to learn anything.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Define irony? Maybe not, maybe it's to help you avoid sites that are overly simplistic?
I do not play in the middle of the road
Democratic National Committee: 21% Basic, 77% Intermediate, less than 1% Advanced .org site and RNC has .com? Weird)
Republican National Committee: 11, 87, less than 1 (DNC has
Whitehouse: 6, 87, 5
Or Wikileaks: 1, 42, 56
Of course the epicenter of stupid, Sarah Palin's Facebook page, 64, 33, 1
A few Slashdot worthy ones:
Microsoft: 12, 77, 9
Apple: 48, 49, 2 (anyone surprised here?)
Linux: 4, 91, 3
It tends to mark encyclopaedic and dictionary-like entries as more complex, it seems.
Not too surprising; even if they try to keep the explanations simple, they still have to include the terms they are trying to explain, which will count against them if Google is comparing against a list of "simple vocabulary."
a coming of hipsters who flaunt around their consistent use of the "advanced reading level only" setting when they search things.
If you look at the rankings of nutter pseudo-science sites and fringe political babble, they are strongly correlated with a high "reading level". I can't imagine that it is because of the content -- the content is insane -- but because people on these sites often use big-word babble when elaborating on their delusions. They may be using fluffy prose, but there is no "there" there.
Consequently, I would take the reading level with a grain of salt.
Congrats You're redding level have been risen by +3 points
Not counting Google Translate, I think the "difficult" reputation of German writers comes either from bad translators or, more likely, good translators trying their hardest not to lose the nuances of the German language. I think the best translators are the translators that attempt to find equivalent concepts in the target and source languages. Is it okay to lose something in the translation in the effort to make the translation read right? If a translation is too opaque, then you lose any chance of the work being read by readers who can't understand the original language.
1. Advanced
2. Intermediate
3. Beginning
4. Foxnews Viewer
Table-ized A.I.
For site:google.com, there is an even 33% split. Under advanced the first results are pisca pictures.
No, I actually meant aliterate; not illiterate OR alliterate... the "aliterate" option will return images along with concise Stephenie (--- yes it's spelled like that) Meyer-esque (sordid, teeny-bopper romance-cum-pornography) summaries.
See the second link under the "Advanced" filter: Apparently reading level is not based entirely on the quality, density or accessibility of ideas in prose, but in the element of situational humor as well.
Google is 33% basic, intermediate, and advanced... http://www.google.com/search?q=site:google.com&hl=en&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images&tbs=rl:1
Considering how little of slashdot is indexed well (if at all), I'm not sure those numbers have any value whatsoever. Unless they are describing the actual code that runs slashdot, in which case the numbers are total bullshit because we all know that slashdot is primarily coded by drunken monkeys.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It is a common mis-perception that all problems can be solved if we just advance the cause of science by a significant degree in the correct direction, but alas some things can not be remedied by any technological advancement.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Since no one else has done it yet...
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A4chan.org&hl=en&tbo=1&prmdo=1&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=off&tbs=rl%3A1
39% Basic, 57% Intermediate, 3% Advanced
Anyone else surprised?
Well, the last time I checked the total percentage should be 100, yet the summary only accounts for 99 and nobody seems to have picked up on it, so who knows? (Yes, I know there is missing data to the right of the decimal point to account for the deficit)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I set the results to advanced only and googled "fart" It returned wikipedia pages as 1st and 2nd results and a company advertisement for activated charcoal underwear pads. None of which I would consider advanced reading. I suspect that advanced actually means something closer to average adult reading level, with basic meant as something much easier.
34% basic
Oddly discarded from the reported results were 2% COBOL and 4% Lisp. C results were discarded for using the "wrong" brace style (regardless of style used).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I tried a few sites of mine. "Downside.com", which has financial predictions (the dot-com crash, the mortgage meltdown, the oil spike, the auto industry bankruptcies), is rated mostly "intermediate", although the material there is heavy going unless you're up to speed on finance. "Animats.com", which has theory papers on some subjects in computer graphics and physics engines, is mostly rated "intermediate".
On the other hand, my fun site for steampunk stuff, "aetherltd.com", is mostly rated as "advanced", presumably because it's deliberately written in an archaic style.
I suspect it's just one of those sentence length and word length count algorithms.
that thou are
Ah? Are Americans actually all alliterate?
A Sarah Palin tag on this story? Seriously? I can understand not liking her but damn, that makes Slashdot just look childish.
Love sees no species.
This is way too intellectual and shows that Google doesn't really grok the Internet. What people really want is an "unsafe search" that returns only images that have been flagged as "unsuitable for minors".
No sig today...
Actually I'm quite pleased with this, because most ultra junk pages are basic so far.
Given our front page stories, this is Google implementing this, not Yahoo. So all you have to do is put about 4 sanity-check algorithms behind it to check coherence and that should nuke most of the cheap SEO attempts for "round 1".
I'm having run searching on Advanced. I'm a cardinal member of the Teal Deer club. It's proving really funny for NSFW searches!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Actually, alliteration almost always annoys any average American audience.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Slashdot is only 1% advanced and 1/3rd simple. Not that hard to understand for the average joe!!
Either I have too great an opinion of myself or I am grossly underestimating the average joe!!????
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
My site came up as 100% advanced. Clearly this is working :-).
I feel like this could be pretty nifty if you're trying to learn a language by using the internet and you want to make sure that what you're looking at isn't going to go over your head for sure. However, while looking at google.de, it seems like the reading level isn't an option in advanced search.
Currently 4chan (2%) is more advanced than /. (1%)
I cannot wait until somebody writes a script to rank all Universities in the world.
I just did the top ten in my country and the results are not what we are led to believe according to the current ranking system.
I did harvard.edu and, honestly, kudos.
.
Query: Fuck Advanced tier papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=896790 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck_Off_(art_exhibition) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderfuck This is a good way to get articles that you otherwise won't know about in your lifetime.
http://archeleus.com/blog
Query: Fuck
Advanced tier
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=896790
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck_Off_(art_exhibition)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderfuck
This is a good way to get articles that you otherwise won't know about in your lifetime.
http://archeleus.com/blog
I just checked two sites I run. Seemingly the site I want to be basic is 60% basic 34% intermediate and 4% advanced. So in parts it's more advanced than slashdot so probably I have failed a little there! The other one is just my general stuff and it works out a quarter basic, half intermediate and a quarter advanced which I guess is probably about right. Thanks Google, I think that can be a great help to me even if I won't be dumbing down my searches. ~~~~
thou discernest my thoughts from afar
Slashdot is green. It is big. It has lots and lots of users.
Slashdot people talk a lot. They type words.
Slashdot is a good site. I like slashdot.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Slashdot is green. It is big. It has lots and lots of users.
Slashdot people talk a lot. They type words.
Slashdot is a good site. I like slashdot.
A lot.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Google confirms it: nerdy in-jokes alienate most of the population
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Slashdot assumes anybody can compile anything.
You inarticulate clods.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
4chan is 3% advanced content compared to Slashdot's 1%. Stormfront is ahead of Slashdot also at 3%. At least we can comfort ourselves on the fact that we're ahead of Chimpout. Good job everyone.
In some portions of America this is true, but they are less PC about it, referring to it as "acting white" as if being white is the only measure of how smart someone is.
When you have a culture driven by hateful music, advancing disrespect for society and morality, how can you expect those who listen to it to get beyond it?
We can spend tens of thousands of dollars per child but if their community does not support their advancement it all goes to waste.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
My first reaction was to try and get a "high score" on the advanced scale.
Reading level advanced gave me a score of 49 %.
Plasma Dynamics gave me a 95 %
Quantum Cascade laser gave me a 90 %
Quantum modeling of a nanoscale mosfet gave me a 97 %
Advanced law topics gave me a 6 %.
I got tired after this. Anyone get a 100 %
I put it to my own personal test, and it passed; for wolfram.com:
Basic - 1%
Intermediate - 18%
Advanced - 79%
80% of Advanced was the word "citation"
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&lr=&tbs=rl%3A1&source=hp&q=site%3Amyspace.com&btnG=Search
FOX News is going to LOVE this!
This reading level filter actually works here. Last night when I noticed this story on slashdot, I decided to try it out the next time I used google.
A few minutes later I set the reading filter to 'advanced' and tried to find a technical specification article. Which surprisingly popped up in the top 3 results.
As a quick test, I turned off the filter and did the search again, all I got this time was links to various forums, a wikipedia entry, and an archived conversation on some mailing list.
I'd say it's great for hunting things down. It's just another 'what' in the 'search for what?' that search engines do.
84% advanced.. seems to be influenced by level of technical terms.
Bravo good sir, you win by not only alliterating, but doing so in a perfectly cromulent sentence.
> Slashdot is 1 % advanced, 64 % intermediate and 34 % basic."
What's the missing 1%, then ? CowboyNeal ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
we all knew:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:youtube.com&num=10&hl=en&lr=&safe=images&tbs=rl:1&prmd=ivns&sa=X&ei=jY8LTbKUCMbxsgaq--T6DA&ved=0CAQQhQE
funny: if you filter to only "advanced" youtube-sites, you get the spam-channels
The results include such a pile of broken/falsified/hardcoded data that it's not even funny.
For example:
4chan.org 39/56/3 (about same as Slashdot)
4chan.org/b/ 100/0/0
8chan.org 0/100/0
er...?
google.com 33/33/33
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It's shows up under basic. What does that tell you?
...Some kind of search engine where I type in words and the search engine returns only pages that contain those words. Can Google work on that next?
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm sick and tired of getting hundreds of totally irrelevant search results because Google can't follow its own 'allintext:' directive, and it just plain pisses me off that there's no way of forcing the engine to perform an EXACT character match, i.e. one that matches punctuation and case. And don't get me started on Google's assumption that I MUST have wanted different search criteria than I entered, forcing me to click again to search for what I damned-well entered in the first place. Google really needs to get the basics right, instead of working hard to make results even less useful than they already are.
I used to say of Microsoft "They always just know what I want, and they're almost always wrong". Lately, I've started saying the same thing about Google.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
According to the article, the index is based on studies about what language teachers believe about a text, not how well actual readers understand a text.
I don't know much about English readability tests. But LIX is a time honoured readability test developed for Swedish, that work fairly well for English (the ratio just have to be interpreted a little different(*)). [Look at the Swedish or Danish Wikipedia article for how to interpret the index when used with both those languages]. It is based on extensive statistical data about how well actual readers of different age and background understand a wide range of (Swedish) texts on different topics. I don't think its accuracy is as well proven for English as it is for Swedish, but I do know that there has at least been some studies that show that it work surprisingly well for English too. Despite its simplicity, the only bad thing about LIX is that it can be fooled by a malicious writer that know how LIX work.
(*) E.g: Unlike Swedish writers, English writers don't normally use sentences that span several pages. As the English language is unsuitable for long sentences (**) and English readers are less used to read long sentences, the weight of long sentences have to be interpreted different.
(**) You can't rearrange the sentence flow as flexible as in Swedish, which means that readers have to keep a lot more information in their working memory and each piece of information for a more extended time period when reading a long (well written) English sentence, then a reader that read a long (well written) Swedish sentence. Modern Swedish is fairly similar in structure and flexibility to the English used when Shakespeare was alive.
These two side-notes would have been only one sentence in Swedish (two sentences if this one is included), about 1/3 in size, although I'm pretty sure a native English writer could have made these notes shorter (as well as easier to read).
PORN really does make you go blind.