Google just released a new ‘reading level filter‘ in the Advanced Search section of their search – the part that probably only librarians actually regularly use.
I’ve run it on a few of our domains with interesting results.
Here’s our main powerhousemuseum.com.
After seeing that I went off and ran it over a slew of other museums to see if I could spot any patterns. It seems that natural history museums have the highest proportion of ‘advanced’ whilst art museums bias towards the ‘intermediate’.
I also tried on of the new ‘events calendar’ sites we’ve been involved in building (behind the scenes post coming soon). Being a calendar site aimed at parents looking for holidays activities we want to make sure that it has the broadest possible appeal. Fortunately we seem to do rather well – 100% Basic!
I’m not sure how valuable this really is in the long run but it is another tool to experiment with. There’s been some fun analysis of different news (and other) sites using the tool over at Virtual Economics.