The Google College Rankings

Any country that has a Google address—such as google.co.za—can have its universities Google-ranked with just a bit of effort. If we use a clean browser to search for the word “university” at google.co.za, we get this ranking of South African universities (after the usual brain-filtering has been applied to remove extraneous links):

1. University of Pretoria
2. University of Johannesburg
3. Stellenbosch University
4. University of the Witwatersrand
5. University of South Africa
6. University of Cape Town
7. University of KwaZulu Natal
8. Rhodes University
9. University of the Western Cape
10. “A university of excellence, equity and innovation”

The mysterious “university of excellence, equity and innovation”—that’s exactly how its <title> appears in Google, with no other identifying name—turns out to be the University of the Free State. As I write this its website seems to be inaccessible, so I can add little more other than to recommend that its excellent webmasters brush up on their HTML.

Universities in multi-lingual countries like South Africa often have historic (and present-day) associations with particular language communities. What happens if we search the South African pages on google.co.za not for the English word “university” but for the Afrikaans word “universiteit“? This is the top-five ranking we get:

1. Universiteit Stellenbosch
2. University of Pretoria
3. “A university of excellence, equity and innovation” (there it is again!)
4. North-West University (Die Noordwes-Universiteit)
5. University of Johannesburg

The University of Pretoria, number one in the English-focused list, is replaced here by the University of Stellenbosch, one of South Africa’s most well-known Afrikaans-speaking universities. And in this list the mysterious University of the Free State appears again as the Universiteit van die Vrystaat.