The present invention discloses a readability indicator based information retrieval method. The method comprises: in a searching process by using a search engine, sorting documents, which meet a search condition, according to a relevance between the documents and a query keyword; and organizing the documents that meet the search condition, a relevance sorting and a readability score into a page and returning the page to a user, wherein a text readability score equals to M*(N*average Chinese stroke number+(1-N)*difficult Chinese word frequency)+(1-M)*(P*average English character number+(1-P)*difficult English word frequency), M adjusts a weight proportion of Chinese and English readability, N adjusts weight proportions between an average Chinese stroke number indicator and a difficult Chinese word frequency indicator, and P adjusts a weight proportion between an average English character number indicator and a difficult English word frequency indicator. According to the method disclosed by the present invention, the readability score of the document is returned after retrieval, so that the user can conveniently and rapidly extract a relatively readable portion from the documents with a relatively high relevance, so that retrieval efficiency is improved.