Often, search volumes and visits to websites suggest people interests. The good thing about quantifying such entities is not only that you can say A is better than B, but also A is X times better than B.
Google Trends gives an option to compare volumes of multiple searches. This is the result for IISc vs IIT Bombay vs IIT Kanpur vs IIT Delhi.
This is the result for IISc vs IIT Bombay vs Harvard vs Stanford vs Princeton.
It is evident and expected to have a gap between Indian and these foreign institutes — but these images serve well to quantify — and the ratio may be surprising to some. Although, for Indian colleges, the search volumes have been almost constant over time, one can see steady decrease in the search volumes for Harvard, Stanford and Princeton — that too despite the slight increase in the news reference volumes for these colleges. Does this suggest some trend?
There is also a new provision in Google Trends to see number of daily unique visitors to some sites. Here is the result for iisc.ernet.in, iitb.ac.in, iitk.ac.in, iitd.ac.in.
This is the result for number of unique visitors for iisc.ernet.in, iitb.ac.in, harvard.edu, stanford.edu, princeton.edu.
It is interesting to see a sudden drop of visits to these sites during Christmas time.
If you happen to try some interesting trends for colleges, do post a link.
iisc life. 