Ranking the Rankings

University rankings are popping everywhere now. It is time to start comparing them with each other. First, here are the number of results from a Yahoo! search using the official names of the rankings. In the lead is the THE-QS World University Rankings, followed by the USNWR America's Best Colleges. The Shanghai rankings have made a much smaller impact and the Webometrics rankings even less. No doubt a search in languages other than English would lead to different results as would a search using different names.

Still, it seems that in the webosphere THE-QS have a strong lead among the international rankings.

"World University Rankings" (THES-QS) 942,000
"America's Best Colleges" (US News and World Report) 892,000
"Times Good University Guide" (UK) 252,000
"Academic Ranking of World Universities" (Shanghai) 123,000
"Guardian Good University Guide" (UK) 87,300
"Maclean's University Rankings" (Canada) 14,200
"World University Ranking on the Web" (Webometrics) 9,890
"CHE/Die Zeit University Ranking" (Germany) 4,570
"Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities" (Taiwan) 2,120