'Reading Level' Filter Added To Google Search 266
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."
But... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps Google should set it on basic by default. It's not like people would notice the internet getting any dumber.
You might be surprised.
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Oooo fun! (from highest to lowest Reading Level)
foxnews is 2% advanced and 73% intermediate
cnn.com is 2% advanced and 70% intermediate
pbs.org/news is 1% advanced - 84% intermediate
slashdot is 1% advanced and 64% intermediate.
And the surprise:
MSnbc is 0.5% advanced and 55% intermediate
"Tut-tut. I think I am experiencing cognitive dissonance. Obviously this google formula is flawed because everyone knows NBC is the best source for unbiased news. And FOX #1 in reading level? Bah. Humbub." - MSnbc viewer
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http://knowyourmeme.com/i/000/063/180/original/We_need_to_go_derper.jpg [knowyourmeme.com]
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
How am I supposed to choose the correct filter when I don't know what the word "intermediate" means?!
I assume this act of Google means reading level will soon be influencing page rank, results sorting, and more basic documents will begin to appear first
No problem. Stories will be at the top. The top ones will explain what intermediate is
Website operators will have to act. To keep their top spot.
Writers will need to make their sites basic.
Advanced grammar will go away.
Compound sentences will be banned.
Most pronouns will be banned.
Most contractions will be banned.
Making lists of things in one sentence will be banned.
Pages that do banned things will be hard to find.
Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)
Why do I have this horrible vision of LOLcats pages getting the first page on any result you might be looking for on a "basic" setting?
Re:But... (Score:4, Informative)
I can haz slashdot.
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I can haz pagerank?
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There's nothing wrong with basic grammar. It might not be as fun to read, but more people can understand it. Also, some people will likely be interested in "advanced" or "intermediate" sites, so sites catering to a smarter audience will have to be written better.
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Basic does not necessarily mean easier to read for a literate audience. A longer sentence may be better constructed, or link related ideas more naturally. Long words may allow more concise writing or be more precise.
Re:But... (Score:4, Informative)
After playing around with it, I get the impression that it's not literary reading level, but technical reading level. Unlike the Fleisch-Kincaid test that uses the lengths of words and sentences, Google's test seems less concerned with long sentences and more with the choice of words. This is arguably a better way to go about it, but it's a luxury Fleisch-Kincaid can't afford in it's single line definition.
For example, searching for random phrases from War and Peace by Tolstoy returns 0% Advanced results. The simple english wikipedia page for dissection [wikipedia.org], which is readable to excess but contains some technical terms ("To dissect is to cut up a body so as to reveal its structure. The body could be that of a human, an animal, or a plant. ") classifies as Advanced.
I definitely agree with your view on basic grammar, and Google's method ensures that basic grammar about advanced topics will still be classified as advanced.
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We can't put the broken part in the machine. It wouldn't smash the right tiny things together. Then the machine might break. That would be very sad.
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I get the impression this will be an optional setting mainly of use to children and those with learning difficulties. Google already filter results by default to prevent adult material showing up unless you specifically search for it. It is most visible when using image search but the main web search and instant/suggest do it as well.
In fact Google already ranks results based on the language you use when searching. If you type in "Newton's Laws" you get introductory material written for laypeople, while "Ne
Re:But... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Any damn fool can write "advanced" jargon: it only takes a bit of time to study some vocabulary lists to do so.
But to be able to communicate clearly and concisely in basic English-- now that takes intelligence. That is the kind of writing that is worth reading.
Re:Advanced (Score:2)
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!
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Judging from the Google results it has something to do with some sexual practice I didn't WANT to know about!
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It almost seems like anything that isn't "kid's book level" or "PHD degree" gets lumped into intermediate.
I think that's a perfectly fine distinction.
What people REALLY wanted... (Score:2)
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".
Simple English Wikipedia (Score:2)
Re:Simple English Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
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= [google.com] Basic 28% Intermediate 55% Advanced 16% I think someone didn't live up to his claims!
My word, if you made it any simpler you'd be down to words of three letters or less.
(Tries it on own site.)
100% BASIC?!? Oh, hell no. You don't use words like "beset" in basic writing.
I do hereby put on my smartypants crown and declare this b0rken.
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Yeah... my own site comes up as 100% intermediate.
Re:Simple English Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
Sure you do. "I want my TV to beset to channel 8".
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You don't use words like "beset" in basic writing.
Sure you do. "I want my TV to beset to channel 8".
Well, you're losing advanced points for that remark.
WWE is on channel 8 right now.
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My site is at a rather pathetic 91/8/1. Though at least you can filter individual sites and see which pages it thinks are advanced and such.
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Yeah, I'm going to have to concur: having run this little 'test' on a handful of my sites, there's no plausible world in which "intermediate" is truly "intermediate".
I had a couple "stupid" sites rank in as intermediate, as well as a handful of sites I'd consider pompous and over-written (words used, structure, etc.) as "intermediate". It's somewhat flawed in its decisiveness.
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It could have to do with the size of the vocabulary used. An encyclopedia will always have a huge number of different words, no matter how simple you make the pages.
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Yeah, that's really the fundamental problem with these sorts of filters. Advanced vocabulary rarely occurs on simple sites, so the presence of such words should definitely mean a higher reading level, but the absence of them does not necessarily indicate a lower reading level. For example, Slashdot talks about relatively advanced topics, but mostly does so in simple language, with only a limited amount of jargon, so it gets misreported as "simple" when the average person still won't be able to make heads
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This is probably correct. PubMed: 98% advanced [google.com]
Nature: 61% advanced [google.com]
Science: 94% advanced [google.com]
PNAS: 99% advanced [google.com]
Can anyone figure out why science is so much more "advanced" than Nature? Both seem pretty similar to me.
Oh, and by way of a control group:
I Can Has Cheez Burger, surprisingly 11% intermediate [icanhascheezburger.com]
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Re:DURRRRR (Score:5, Funny)
Hahaha. Soon "Advanced" will be renamed to "Faggy and retarded" to aid comprehension.
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Sign in a College parking lot:
Juniors, Seniors, and Grduates.
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I think this approach is crap.
This might have made sense 20 years ago. But since that time a few things have changed:
99% advanced (Score:3)
99% advanced [google.com]. On the other hand, Wikipedia is quite evenly distributed.
94% basic (Score:2)
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*gasp*
Google can now even rate music for complexity and originality?
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Its official. (Score:2)
Hm.. (Score:2)
Okay quick (Score:5, Funny)
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 [wikipedia.org])
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Not opaque enough; everyone knows German writers are the most difficult to understand!
Some, who are thought to be taking a profound view, are heard to say that everything turns upon the subject-matter, and that the form may be ignored. The business of any writer, and especially of the philosopher, is, as they say, to discover, utter, and diffuse truth and adequate conceptions. In actual practice this business usually consists in warming up and distributing on all sides the same old cabbage. Perhaps the resu
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I disagree.
Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in conv
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Choosing a selection from the first chapter of Capital rather than a later chapter as an example of understandable German writing is dialectical as fuck, especially as a reply to Hegel.
Marx is a really impressive guy, using Hegelian methods to create works that are not only understandable, but relevant and durable. Not even Hegel himself came close to doing that!
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Sure, that sounds like a tough contradiction for a translator to face.
One of the things I've noticed about German speakers and was brought up in a class I had in college about foreign cultures was that Germans and very thorough about historical exposition; this seems to be a mostly cultural boundary that is difficult for Americans to come to terms with since we prefer a much faster pace. I've come to appreciate the approach of leaving no stone unturned; however, I still can't get into Hegel.
Simple English Wikipedia not marked very simple... (Score:2)
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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
Kudo's to testing (Score:2)
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 ultim
This. Is. AWESOME. (Score:4, Funny)
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!
The following option is req'd for 95% of Americans (Score:3, Funny)
-aliterate
Re:The following option is req'd for 95% of Americ (Score:5, Funny)
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Is that for results that all start with the same sound?
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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.
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Ah? Are Americans actually all alliterate?
Re:The following option is req'd for 95% of Americ (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, alliteration almost always annoys any average American audience.
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Time travel maybe; what you propose? No. (Score:2)
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.
P.O.R.N. (Score:5, Funny)
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You, sir, have a really, really disturbing fetish!
What about keyword searches? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:What about keyword searches? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that would be sweet. Especially if it didn't filter out special characters commonly used in programming languages, like .:()[]{}
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Someone throw that guy a modpoint or two.
There is no way to express just how much frustration it can be to be looking for something that contains certain special characters for a good reason, mostly because omitting this character results in very different, and very useless, results.
If anyone knows how to "force" Google to include punctuation in the searches (or, almost as important, how to NOT include it), please enlighten us.
Re:What about keyword searches? (Score:4, Insightful)
For Pete's sake, I've never understood why they didn't support some simple subset of regular expressions. Just "simple" stuff, like character classes and multipliers.
Also, while I don't mind being corrected on my spelling (being that, despite trying to be diligent, I certainly make mistakes), what the heck is up with google flatly refusing to search for my exact text? It was fine when you searched for 'x,' they asked "do you actually mean y?" But now, it takes me three searches before I figure out the magic phrasing that will actually do my search and not return "corrected" results.
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Speaking from knowledge of search engine indexing; you can't search on regular expressions because the search index is heavily heavily optimised and the only way to search for a regex would be to generate all the possible expansions and search for them individually. You could do it, it would just fuck up everyone's processes.
If you've done anything with SQL think about how slow wildcard text searches are compared to an indexed primary key search, then multiply by a couple of orders of magnitude since search
What does it change? (Score:2)
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.
Fox News is "Smarter" than Slashdot (Score:2)
23% Basic
73% Intermediate
2% Advanced
Here Comes Idiocracy (Score:2)
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.
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Anonimous Coward comment notwhitstandig
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 16:05:00 -0400 (EDT) /dev/null@mongoose.bostic.com
From: Keith Bostic
Subject: The dangers of taking a service droid off script
To:
So the 2.30p flight from San Jose to Seattle doesn't take off until 5p. But that's a different story. The point is it's now 8pm: I'm tired, I'm irritable, I'm hungry, I'm lazy. So I decide to avail myself of that characteristically American service industry: The fast-food restaurant.
For reasons of privacy, I've chan
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At a modern McDonald's (at least the one I worked in) the workload (using shitty ghetto touchscreens, not actual buttons) is:
1) Customer orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, no pickles, extra horseshit
2) Register guy presses #2 (for QPC meal), bringing up another menu.
3) Register guy presses something like "Sandwich only" as opposed to a meal deal
4) Register guy presses "Order" then presses the sandwich on the list of things ordered.
5) That brings up a screen where he can press NO PICKLES and EXTRA HORSESH
Might as well make this political (Score:3)
Republican National Committee [google.com]: 11, 87, less than 1 (DNC has
Whitehouse [google.com]: 6, 87, 5
Or Wikileaks: 1, 42, 56 [google.com]
Of course the epicenter of stupid, Sarah Palin's Facebook page [google.com], 64, 33, 1
A few Slashdot worthy ones:
Microsoft [google.com]: 12, 77, 9
Apple [google.com]: 48, 49, 2 (anyone surprised here?)
Linux [google.com]: 4, 91, 3
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You forgot :P
Google [google.com]: 33, 32, 33. I have no idea how they pulled that off, maybe it got stuck in some kind of recursion.
NASA [google.com]: 6, 36, 56. Even Google knows rocket science is complicated.
Hulu [google.com]: 81, 17, 1. Now we know what they expect of the mainstream television audience.
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Then in contrast Stephen Hawking's facebook page: 35, 45, 18
harvard.edu : 3, 10, 85
It appears to be biased toward big words (Score:2)
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.
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You cannot think opposite of what you were taught to think. You have a cyclop perspective and taught android mentality.
Timecube.com had 89,000,000 links at one time, it's almost that now [google.com]. Once again, Google provides further here that 4-corner days are real.
Robots.txt (Score:2)
Does it mean anything for slashdot pages? (Score:2)
Unreported choices (Score:3)
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).
It's just a "big words" style check. (Score:2)
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
Sarah Palin? (Score:2)
A Sarah Palin tag on this story? Seriously? I can understand not liking her but damn, that makes Slashdot just look childish.
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IT's not useless. It's a guideline.
Re:Reading level is useless (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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How dare you derail a perfectly good rant...
Re:Reading level is useless (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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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".
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Considering that the average reading level of an adult in Canada and the US is between grades 6-9? Dunno, that's the main reason why print media(read all news papers), use a simplified format.
Re:High school math versus college math (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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There's no "Business Math" in high school!
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I did a few searches for random things on 'advanced'
I think it's counting commas and rating based on punctuation count.
It loves dictionary definitions on advanced.
On further look I think it's simply software diagramming the sentences, and grading on complexity.
Dings for bad grammar.
Points for using big words as well. Write metropolis not city, Policeman not cop. (that's just a WAG on my part.)
I for one would be proud of writings that this POS grade basic.
Think of it as a reverse readability s
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But that actually does sound useful for grading the sophistication required of the reader. Judging the sophistication of the author would be a much more difficult task for a computer, wouldn't it?
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Granting that complex sentences require more of the reader.
Granting your insightful comment regarding my previous post; feted overgrown purple sentences, with unnecessary phrases and useless digressions, are difficult to decipher and require more focus and clarity of the mind of the reader.
I guess I just don't see a reason to find the second version.
Complex thoughts can only be conveyed when written clearly. Even then it is a challenge for both writer and reader.
I would challenge the algorithm to s
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IIRC, Hegel managed to get kicked out of grad school for being a bad writer. He still managed to be quite influential as far as philosophers go, although he is consistently (and perhaps intentionally) opaque.
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Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I didn't search, I just filtered. The #2 advanced result for slashdot is the robots.txt file.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:slashdot.org&hl=en&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images&tbs=rl:1#q=site:slashdot.org&hl=en&num=10&lr=&cr=&safe=images&tbs=rl:1,rls:2&sa=X&ei=n98KTZWWFMKC8gbr_omfAQ&ved=0CIABEIoKKAI&fp=9bef8cda26d1a6ec [google.com]
It does seem like $20 words do well, but "collision" comes up a lot in slashdot discussion
64 + 34 + 1 = 100? (Score:2)
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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.
The "League of Unfathomable Slugs" is complaining that Google has turned them into the "5556 meters of division by zero 14.5939029 kilograms"
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a coming of hipsters who flaunt around their consistent use of the "advanced reading level only" setting when they search things.
That piqued my curiosity, so I searched for "i can haz cheezburger" [google.com] at the "Advanced" reading level to see what search results would pop up.
Behold! Emeril [icanhascheezburger.com], and a rather dense description of anorexia nervosa.
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