"Towards more readable web: measuring readability of web pages based on link structure" by Adam Jatowt, Kouichi Akamatsu, Nimit Pattanasri, and Katsumi Tanaka with Ching-man Au Yeung as coordinator
Adam Jatowt, Kouichi Akamatsu, Nimit Pattanasri, Katsumi Tanaka · ACM SIGWEB Newsletter · 2012
Although Web search engines have become information gateways to the Internet, search results often contain pages that are difficult to understand for non-expert users, especially when queries contain technical or rare terms. Readability indexes are well-known measures for estimating text comprehensibility. However, readability indexes are not sufficient for evaluating the comprehensibility of Web pages, as they are designed for general purpose texts. In this research, we investigate the relationship between links and readability of text extracted from Web pages for two datasets, namely English and Japanese pages. We then describe a link analysis algorithm for measuring comprehensibility of Web pages based on the TrustRank algorithm originally used for combating Web spam. Lastly, we report results of preliminary studies to measure the correlation between search rank and readability of Web search results.