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'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."
How am I supposed to choose the correct filter when I don't know what the word "intermediate" means?!
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!
99% advanced. On the other hand, Wikipedia is quite evenly distributed.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Hahaha. Soon "Advanced" will be renamed to "Faggy and retarded" to aid comprehension.
which is totally what she said
IT's not useless. It's a guideline.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
It's English used in those math sites. You can express complex ideas in simple terms, and simple ideas in complex terms. It has nothing to do with the actual content.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
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?
Yeah my son is eight years old and reading long novels now, but when he was at pre-school age he would take DVDs he liked (say Ben-10) and type the titles one letter at a time into google to get the youtube related videos list. Then he would be set for hours. Most of it was above his reading level but all he needed to kow was that B on the title matches B on the keyboard.
And once they get the hang of reading they fly past the "levels".
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They already have that option, but it's labeled Images.
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.
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
What happens if you come across a slug? a fathom? a league? your automatic translation is gonna screw alotta stuff up that wasn't intended.
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
In what sense is it a "guideline"? Perfectly clear text can get a poor readability index, incomprehensible text can get good readability.
A reading index is just like a measuring tape. It can't tell you that you built a crappy house with crooked walls and a leaky roof; it can only tell you that something is 40 feet long by 30 feet wide.
A reading index is a tool that simplifies understanding, reducing a very complex thing to a simple number that's useful for comparisons. Just like you can use the measurements of the house to figure out that it's 1,200 square feet, you can compare that to a house that is 2,400 square feet. Neither measurement tells you the quality of the construction, the color, the flooring, the lot size, or the neighborhood. But if you're looking for a home for a family of six, knowing the floor space is one thing that can help weed out the useless candidates quickly. If you're looking for a book for first graders, you don't trot out a book with a reading index of 18.
And claiming it doesn't work on incomprehensible text is like complaining that a measuring tape can't tell you the color of a house. A reading index is not an interpreter of syntax, grammar, spelling, or any other attribute of text. It just measures one simple set of dimensions of text.
A reading scoring system can only give you an indication, not a guarantee, of what kind of audience should be able to comprehend a given piece of text; and it can give you an indication of relative difficulty. For example, the widely used Flesch-Kincaid Readability Index bases its score on the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word, and outputs a "grade level". The grade levels were probably modeled on the textbooks and lesson books of the era in which it was developed. Is it still relevant? Perhaps the actual grade levels are different these days, but it's still a widely accepted model because it's useful for what it does provide.
John
Ah? Are Americans actually all alliterate?
Actually, alliteration almost always annoys any average American audience.
Ice Cream has no bones.
A reading index is just like a measuring tape. It can't tell you that you built a crappy house with crooked walls and a leaky roof; it can only tell you that something is 40 feet long by 30 feet wide.</p></quote>
Not true!
If the measuring tape is wet, then the roof must be leaking!
If the measuring tape is swinging, then the house must have a draft!
If the measuring tape is white, then even snow is getting in!
If you can't see the measuring tape, then your electricity is out!
And if you have a candle, and you still can't see it, then it must be foggy!
I'm sure there is more than this that a measuring tape could tell you, if you would be creative!
Ok, fine then, I won't post an entire Larry the Cable Guy stand-up routine in hopes of zeroing out our 1%.