The Best Universities in Germany
Jan 12th, 2009 by GCR Editor
Germany is the birthplace of the modern research university, and throughout the nineteenth century young people from around the world who were seeking advanced learning traveled to the leading German institutions of that era and brought Germanic research methods and institutional structures back to their home countries.
What can we learn about today’s German universities by examining their Google-rankings? As usual, we can conduct our investigation in English or in the country’s native language.
If we search google.de on the the English word university, this is the filtered ranking we get in return:
- Heidelberg University
- University of Hamburg
- University of Stuttgart
- University of Cologne
- Universität Tübingen
- Universität Leipzig
- Universität Bielefeld
- Jacobs University Bremen
- University of Freiburg
- University of Regensburg
It’s interesting that the English-language homepages of both Tübingen and Leipzig use the German name of the institution exclusively in the page <title>
. (The Bielefeld entry goes to the German-language homepage.) A simple change of the English-language page titles to “University of Tübingen” and “University of Leipzig” might well push them up higher in these English-focused Google rankings.
Instead of using the English word university, if we search google.de on the German word Universität we get this ranking:
- Universität Hamburg
- Universität Heidelberg
- Universität Leipzig
- Universität zu Köln
- Universität Potsdam
- Universität Dortmund
- Universität Regensburg
- Universität Rostock
- Universität Bremen
- Leibniz Universität Hannover
In this case, all the entires go directly to German-language pages (as expected), rather than sometimes to German and sometimes to English pages.