The Google College Rankings

Spain has an ancient university heritage, reaching back into the European Middle Ages. What can modern technology tell us about the relative rankings of Spanish universities today?

If we search google.es for the Spanish word universidad we get these rankings, after the appropriate filtering has been applied:

1. Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
2. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)
3. Universidad de Granada
4. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
5. Universidad de Zaragoza
6. Universidad de Salamanca
7. Universidad de Málaga
8. Universidad de Valladolid
9. Universidad de Sevilla
10. Universidad de Oviedo

Because Spanish is spoken in so many countries, the raw results include many other Spanish-speaking universities outside of Spain proper, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, both of which in fact rank higher on google.es than the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

What about English-language results? If we search google.es for the English word university (instead of the Spanish word universidad) this is Google’s top-ten (filtered) list:

1. University of Navarra
2. Universitat de Barcelona
3. University of Valladolid
4. University of Murcia
5. University of Alicante
6. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)
7. University of Santiago de Compostela (USC)
8. Open University of Catalonia (UOC)
9. Universitat de València
10. Ramon Llull University

Close examination of this list points us to something important. While the most common word for university in Spanish is universidad, in the Catalonian dialect (or language) the word is universitat, as in Universitat de Barcelona. By searching above on the word universidad we missed most of the universities in the Catalonian region of Spain. So let’s rectify that by searching google.es on universitat indead of universidad:

1. Universitat de Barcelona
2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
3. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Assembling even this top-three list requires a great deal of bio-neural filtering because Google does not distinguish in its results between the Catalonian universitat and the German Universität. But it does show that the universities of Catalonia have a distinctive standing of their own, independent of the universidades in the rest of Spain.