“Everyone has different reading abilities. Some people searching the web are university professors and others are 5 year old children. Twurdy has been created to provide people with access to search results that suit their own readability level.” –Twurdy

I wrote recently about Google’s new option for searching by reading level; and now I’ve discovered another option that is perhaps even easier to use.

Twurdy is a search engine (powered by Google) that indicates the reading level of each page in a search result. Pages are given a reading level score, and results are color coded to make it easy for a user to recognize which results are likely to be most helpful.

Twurdy’s goal is to provide web searchers with information that is most appropriate for them. This will mean that 10 year olds doing school assignments don’t have to click through difficult material to find something they can use. It will also mean that phd students do not have to click through websites designed for kids in order to find what they are looking for.

Here are the first four results of a search for ‘Vancouver Island Geography’.   Predictably, the Wikipedia article yields a higher reading level than the other 3 results.