What are Merit’s Objectives?
Merit aims to:
- Significantly improve the way people find information on the internet; and
- Help in directing attention to search results that are less biased, better researched, and more useful.
What it does:
- Merit allows you to experiment with what you consider high-quality content.
- Merit uses algorithms to analyze the quality of writing on websites.
- Merit flags the highest-quality websites in your search results based on certain factors—like the word count and the number of quotes on a page—that are indicative of low-quality or high-quality websites. Users can adjust these factors depending on their liking.
What factors does Merit consider?
Reading Time
- is how long it takes to read an article, as measured by its length. We theorized that longer articles mean the author has put more effort into them, and higher effort is linked with quality. In real-world testing, a higher Reading Time was a decent predictor of quality, so we've turned Reading Score on by default.
Reading Score
- is how sophisticated the writing on a website is. We theorized that more sophisticated writing is associated with writers that have more expertise and are better thinkers. In real-world testing, a higher Reading Score was a decent predictor of quality, so we've turned Reading Score on by default.
Unique Links
- is a measure of how many unique links are in an article. We theorized that more links mean an article has more sources, which indicates a better-researched article. In real-world testing, a higher number of Unique Links was somewhat predictive of quality, so we've turned Reading Score off by default.
Images
- is a measure of how many pictures are in an article. We theorized that more images means an article was produced with higher effort, which is linked with quality. In real-world testing, Images were an uncertain predictor of quality, so we've turned Images off by default.
H1 and H2 counts
- are measures of how many headings are in an article. We theorized that more headings means an article is better organized. In real-world testing, header counts were an uncertain predictor of quality, so we've turned header counts off by default.
Which browsers are compatible with the Merit extension?
Merit is compatible with Google Chrome and Brave Browser. We are currently working on having it available in other browsers as well!