Google Provides “Reading Level” Filter & Statistics

Google has added a new advanced search filter named “reading level” to the advanced search page. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable after spotting a thread at the Google Web Search Help forum where a Google Web Search product manager somewhat announced this feature.

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.

For a searcher, this will allow them to find more tailored content for their research level. For example, if you are in an introductory course on biology, you may want to select basic or intermediate results for your specific query. But if you are a professor in biology, you may want to select advanced results.

For a webmaster, it might be fun to see how advanced or basic your site is. I performed a site command search for this site and discovered that 12% of the content here is basic, 87% is intermediate and less than 1% is advanced. Here is the break down:

Here is a screen shot of the labels or annotations on the search results:

For more information on this feature, see this help document.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.