The Best Universities in Europe: Ireland
Jan 3rd, 2009 by GCR Editor
This is the first of a series of posts that will establish initial Google-rankings for the universities in a number of European countries. Sweden and Great Britain have already been reviewed, so let’s look at Ireland next.
If we search google.ie in English for the word university, we get the following ranked list of institutions (after applying a little brain filtering):
- University of Limerick
- University College Dublin
- Dublin City University
- National University of Ireland, Galway
- University College Cork
- Trinity College Dublin – The University of Dublin
- National University of Ireland, Maynooth
(Ireland is a small country, so I list only seven institutions here.)
A consistent problem in establishing overall rankings with Google is search-term dependence, and that can be seen here because a number of institutions in Ireland—most notably Trinity College, a major international university founded in 1592—make more prominent use of the word college in their names than the word university.
What if we search google.ie for college rather than university? We get the following top-five list:
- Trinity College Dublin – The University of Dublin
- University College Dublin
- Portobello College Dublin
- Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
- University College Cork
As an illustration of how irregularly the word college is used, this list contains not only major research and teaching universities such as Trinity College, but also a medical school (the Royal College of Surgeons) and a business training school (Portobello College Dublin).