Over the past three months, the University of Florida Web Administration has been recording weekly search results for various UF-related search terms including “university,” “Florida performing art University of Florida,” “Gators,” “Gator Nation” and “Florida.”

Although this is a small set of terms, the team considers them a proxy for other search terms.

Web Administration has been conducting these searches through four of the most popular search engines on the Web: Google, Yahoo, MSN.com and Ask.com.

Web Administration hopes to better UF's Web presence. Analyzing search results is a step in that direction.

The most common result for most of the searched terms was the UF home page, www.ufl.edu, which over the course of the searches returned multiple first-page hits across all four browsers.

Google, on average, yielded the best results for the terms specified. The average resulting position for all terms was six, while the terms “Florida performing arts,” “University of Florida” and “Gator Nation” were consistently No. 1 in Google.

One of the most exciting results was the University of Florida coming in at No. 1 on four different occasions when searching for “university” using the Yahoo search engine. UF also appeared as high as No. 3 when searching for the same term in Google.

The term that consistently ranked below average across all search engines was “Gators.” The terms “Florida” and “university” were also below average at times.

Through the few months of the project, all searches were performed on IBM-compatible computers running on Windows XP. Search terms were also run through Macintosh computers several times and yielded identical results, except through the Google search engine where results, on average, were better than their PC counterparts by as many as 15 spots at times.

These high search rankings are due in large part to a strict adherence to Web standards, clean page design and semantic coding on the University home page. The length of time with which Web Administration has been complying with Web standards has been instrumental in the enhancement of the UF Web site’s accessibility , usability and searchability.

UF Web Administration will continue to record search results in the future in hopes of bolstering the university’s Web presence and improving accessibility and searchability for its users.