Malaysia: The Top Universities
May 4th, 2009 by GCR Editor
The population of Malaysia is more than 25 million, and the country has a growing higher-education sector. What can we discover about the rankings of Malaysian universities by using Google?
If we do an English-language search first, asking google.com.my to return results for the word university, we get this top-ten listing:
- University of Malaya
- Open University Malaysia
- Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)
- University Putra Malaysia
- Multimedia University
- Sunway Campus, Monash University
- Malaysia Campus, University of Nottingham
- Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman
- HELP University College
- International Islamic University Malaysia
As always, this ranking is prepared with a clean browser, so pre-established Google-preferences don’t influence the result, and it is assembled using light bio-neural filtering.
It’s interesting to see the second-ranking institution here is an open university—largely online, and catering to non-traditional students. Open University Malaysia is less than ten years old and already has more than 70,000 students, “a record of some sort.” Given that Google’s ranking system depends upon a large interlinked web presence, and on external links pointing to the institution’s own pages, it isn’t surprising that a university with a big online division would rank highly. We may well see this pattern intensify as time goes on.
If we switch from English to Bahasa Malaysia and search for the word universiti, we get quite a different ranking:
- Universiti Sains Malaysia
- Universiti Putra Malaysia
- University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM)
- Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM)
- University of Malaya
- Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS
- Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
- Universiti Pedidikan Sultan Idris
- Universiti Darul Iman Malaysia
- Multimedia University
Most of these institutions may not care whether they rank highly on English-language searches for the word university rather than universiti, but a simple change to the HTML title of their home pages that added the English name after the Bahasa Malaysia name—such a change might well put them in the top ten for both languages, increasing their international exposure.
