31–40 of 60 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.
"contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth" Is it possible this phrase is an example of itself? :-)
A few examples that I thought were neat:
- msnbc (44/55/1) vs bbc.co.uk (15/82/2)
- facebook (40/37/22) vs linkedin (2/90/6) (I wondering why facebook has so much "advanced" content according to Google)
- wordpress (35/47/16) vs xanga (76/23/1)
- boston college (5/41/53) vs harvard (2/6/91)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured that, since Google must read every word of every page to spider it, they must thereby have, as a byproduct, the world's most accurate database of word usage frequencies. "Reading level" would then just be a measure of the average frequency of all the words on a page (thus making words learned in a first year ESL class simple, and technical jargon advanced—quite the same as the measure of difficulty used by…
I'd be lying if I said I don't doubt you are not incorrect ;) What you are proposing is a statistically generated version of the Gunning Fog Index ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index ) or the Flesch–Kincaid test ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil... ). If I were Google, I'd try that, but I'd also try something like working out percentage deviation from a Markov chain generated…
Indeed, that was my second thought, but I wonder if the gains are really all that large over a raw statistical analysis of the word bag, and whether they're worth the extra analysis space/time. It really depends on what Google is planning on doing with this metadata, internally; if an order-of-ten precision is fine (to pick out decisive categorizations), the raw analysis may be all that's needed.
I like how the result for "noobcomments" is marked as a Basic Reading Level.
Well, it's official: 4chan is smarter than us. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com&...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be lying if I said I don't doubt you are not incorrect ;) What you are proposing is a statistically generated version of the Gunning Fog Index ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index ) or the Flesch–Kincaid test ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil... ). If I were Google, I'd try that, but I'd also try something like working out percentage deviation from a Markov chain generated…
> If I were Google, I'd try that, but I'd also try something like working out percentage deviation from a Markov chain generated from their crawl. Indeed, that was my second thought, but I wonder if the gains are really all that large over a raw statistical analysis of the word bag, and whether they're worth the extra analysis space/time. It really depends on what Google is planning on doing with this metadata, inter…
It would be equally interesting to only see the reading level of the articles, rather than the comments.
An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.
I mean, even if you don't care about losing people who don't have time to learn a more precise-but-obscure synonym, there's always people who learned English as a third language. Why alienate them just to look a little clever?
Even this comment has too many big words. If I had more time, I'd edit it down more. "alienate" would become "turn off" and "precise-but-obscure synonym" would become... I dunno, something simpler. Big obscure words that lock people out is really missing the forest from the trees.
At the risk of stating the obvious, you can get the results for the reading level of your own HN comments by adding your user name. It's kind of interesting going through the leader board and looking up different people's scores.
Can someone briefly explain how google determines reading level? I'm assuming it's using something like the Flesch–Kincaid test: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil... A brief search on wikipedia reveals a few readability tests, but they all seem to be based on sentence/syllable ratios, not content complexity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Readability_tests And in general they all ran…