Why is it that if you search, on Google, for the term university
with the pages from Australia
option selected, The University of Queensland appears as the second hit (after Monash), yet if you search for the term university australia
with or without the pages from Australia
option selected, UQ does not even make the first page of results (in fact, it is the last hit on page 7 of the results!!!), even though the word Australia
appears on the home page? I even checked the version of the home page that Google has cached to make sure the word Australia
appears in it: it does. What am I missing here? These days I, rightly or wrongly, use Google as a fast reputation check, whereby I suppose I’m using the logic if it’s high on Google‘s list of results for a particular query, then at least the brand/institution/shop/etc is well known
, and this might imply that it has a good reputation (it might not, but at least it’s a good starting point). If international students, corporations, other universities and so on are compiling a quick list of Australian universities for whatever purpose by using Google and UQ isn’t showing up, surely this is a Bad Thing (for UQ). Perhaps this is why UQ isn’t in Google’s list of universities.
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A Google oddity
1 reply on “A Google oddity”
[…] I still find it unbelievable that The University of Queensland, one of Australia’s largest universities and a member of the Group of 8, does not appear on Google’s list of universities. Apparently, the way a university gets onto the list is for large numbers of its students and faculty to ask Google to add the university to the list using a web form. After completing the form, it asks you to tell other people from your university to complete the form. Does the absence of UQ from Google’s list reflect an underlying apathy of UQ students and staff towards their university? Surely not. I have blogged on this topic before, but nothing seems to have changed in the meantime. I am hereby starting the campaign to get UQ on Google’s list. UQ students, staff and alumni, do your bit! […]