The Google College Rankings

Welcome to the Google College Rankings! This is an independent project that uses Google technology to explore the rankings of colleges and universities around the world. We are not Google employees and this project is not sponsored or endorsed by Google — it just uses the excellent Google search engine to shed light on the university rankings business. The site’s editor has more than ten years’ experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator, and has visited and spoken at many colleges and universities in the United States and around the world.

How can you use Google to rank colleges and universities? By filtering the standard results that Google provides with any web search. When you search for any word of phrase with Google — “purple widgets,” for example — Google takes your request and searches through its database for all webpages it knows about that contain the phrase “purple widgets.” But that’s a lot of pages….

[More background to follow. In the meantime, see our post Does Google Really Rank Colleges and Universities?]