Search engine ranks Sweet Briar No. 12 among Virginia schools based on website popularity

These days, various organizations rank colleges and universities on nearly every metric and institutional characteristic you think of. Now, Sweet Briar is solidly positioned on another one.

UniRank, an international “higher education search engine,” lists Sweet Briar at No. 12 among both public and private four-year schools in Virginia.

“The aim of our University Ranking, or League Table, is to provide an approximate non-academic ranking of all Virginia higher education institutions based on the popularity of their official websites,” uniRank says on its 2017 Virginia University Ranking page.

An explanation on the page says that it “provides a custom search engine to search for courses, programs or other higher education-related information provided by officially recognized/accredited Virginia universities, colleges or other higher education institutions offering at least four-year undergraduate degrees, such as bachelor degrees, and/or graduate degrees in a traditional, non-distance education format.”

UniRank’s trademarked University Ranking uses an “algorithm including five unbiased and independent web metrics extracted from four different web intelligence sources,” according the site’s About page.

The overview section further describes uniRank as a search engine and directory reviewing 12,358 accredited colleges and universities, ranked by web popularity, in 200 countries around the world.