Readability of web content An analysis by topic

Abstract

Readability is determined by the characteristics of the text that influence their understanding. The web is composed of content on various topics and the results retrieved in the top positions by the main search engines are expected to be those with the highest number of views. In this study, we analyzed the readability of web pages according to the topic to which it belongs and their position in the search result. For that, we collected the top-20 results retrieved by Google to 23,779 queries from 20 topics and used several readability metrics. The results of the analysis showed that the content from organizations (like colleges and other institutions) and health-related content have lower readability values. Categories Games and Home are on the opposite side. For the categories identified as having less readability, tools can be developed that help the user understand their content. We also found that top-ranked pages have higher values of readability. One can conclude that, directly or indirectly, readability is a factor that seems to be being considered by the Google search engine or has an influence on page popularity.