Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The school has placed first in Israel and 47th in the world in the Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has placed first in Israel and 47th in the world in the Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities.

The ranking rates the influence of academic institutions based on a computerized analysis of the number of times their names appear in the online encyclopedia, as well as the appearances of each school’s name and articles in Google search engine results, according to their PageRank score. PageRank is an algorithm that determines how important a website is based in part on how many other pages link to it. It is used by Google to order search results.

The researchers from France who put together the universities ranking analyzed all 24 different language editions of Wikipedia, including a total of about 17 million articles. British institutions led the ranking, with Cambridge and Oxford universities placing first and second, respectively, followed by American universities Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton.