How reliable the information is from digital market? University Rankings

Nowadays, there is no lack of information to feed our needs and thanks for the prosperity of the digital market and internet revolution.

But does more information always lead to more knowledge? Not necessary. On the contrary, in some cases, the digital market and internet information frequently provide us misleading or even wrong information, which could potentially damage our perception of the world and eventually harm the society.

Taking university ranking as an example, there are many websites that provide university rankings, but the results could be totally different. Some of the rankings are just either not serious or extremely biased. Among all the different rankings, it seems that the US NEWS rankings are more reliable and has good reputations among all the competitors given its seniority of its ranking history.

However, I was shocked and extremally confused about the US NEWS recently rankings. For example, University of Washington in Seattle was ranked #58 in US national rankings but was ranked #8 in Global University rankings.  

University of Washington is definitely a very good university but how come the same agency can rank it so low of #58 in the nation but skyrocketed to #8 worldwide? I completely understood the criteria used to rank in US is different from its rank in worldwide, but such different criteria should have not caused such a huge difference between the US ranking and Worldwide rankings and such contradicted information could mislead audience and confuse human being judgement. What is the rationale behind those inconsistent rankings? Which information should we trust? Are there any potential illegal situations exist in the ranking process?

University ranking is just one of the examples. There are many other situations where the information provided by the websites do not provide us knowledge but rather mislead and confuse people.

Should we regulate internet and digital market, similar as Fed regularity banking and FDA regular drug companies? Probably it is hard to do so but maybe we should seriously start to think about such type of regulations.