The unofficial Google blog announced on Friday a new Google feature that lets you restrict your search results to a certain reading level. You can choose from showing basic results, intermediate results, advanced results or annotating the results with reading levels.

Read more here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-shows-reading-levels-for-search.html

At the moment, this tool is only available on their Advanced Search page, but it’s worth thinking about the effect that such a tool might have on your website visibility if it was more widely used.

It seems logical that most people will choose a reading level that they’re comfortable with, or that they feel will allow them to get the information they want most quickly (i.e., easy to read). So if your web pages are not easy to read – as determined by whatever system Google are using to determine reading levels – then they would appear less and less in people’s results.

In fact, according to Google, less than half of the pages that they have indexed have a basic reading level.

Something to think about for the future?