PinoyLive

University of the Philippines (UP) Tops Most Popular University on the Internet

by Pinoylive on 18/01/12 at 11:31 pm

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine’s only national university is now most popular university in cyberspace, according to the latest ranking from Sydney-based academic search engine posted on 4ICU website (www.4icu.org/ph). UP Diliman campus website (www.up.edu.ph) was ranked number one in the Four International Colleges and Universities (4ICU), an international higher education search engine and directory, where ranking of the 11,000 universities and colleges websites in 200 countries was released early this week.

The Philippine list was made up of the 200 most searched university and college websites, with UP Diliman (http://www.upd.edu.ph) emerging on top. 4ICU listing however treated each UP campuses as separate institutions, as each campus has its own website. Second on the list was  the De La Salle University in Manila.

Other universities included in the top 10 were: the Quezon City-based UP System (3rd), which includes all seven campuses; Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City (4th); University of Sto. Tomas in Manila (5th); UP Los Banos in Laguna (6th); Aquinas University of Legazpi (7th); Mindanao State University’s Iligan Institute of Technology (8th); Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro (9th) and University of San Carlos in Cebu (10th).

According to the 4ICU, rankings were computed using an algorithm, including “unbiased and independent web metrics” from three search engines – the Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic Rank and Majestic Seo Referring Domains.

The algorithm formula was not disclosed for copyright reasons and to prevent any attempts at manipulating the rankings, the website added.

No Philippine tertiary education institution made it to similar online popularity rankings of the top 200 universities and colleges in the world, as well as the top 100 institutions in Asia.

The 4ICU releases its rankings every January and July of each year and have been posted since May 2005, the website said.

Aside from worldwide and regional rankings, the search engine also computes rankings for the 200 countries in its database – all free of charge.

4ICU made it clear that the list was not an academic ranking and is intended to help foreign students in understanding how popular a certain university is in its country, “it should not be adopted as the main criteria.”