Abstract: A system and method presents search results relevant to a search query of a database based on user criteria, such as reading grade level. Reading grade level is used to rank and characterize relevant search results. The determined reading grade level of the search results provides quick and easy access to relevant documents and provides a measure of cognitive ability indicative of the content of the search page result. The system and method obtains an initial set of relevant search results from a corpus of documents in a database and determines the reading grade level of the search result documents. The system and method displays the determined reading grade level of the search results with the search results to provide an easy index or ranking.