Strange and meaningless.
If it's based on the number of appearances, surely there are many universities with the same number. How do you rank them? From my impression of world rankings, Sussex and York never rank high in world rankings. It was the domestic ranking that placed them higher ten years ago. It seems quite far from a proper reflection of world rankings.
Next, world rankings are meaningless. They focus on research output, which is important but not that important. Researchers don't care about universities. They only care about good research. Students and employers care about universities, but they normally use how hard to get in and how good the grade is to measure students' capacity, not research (most students don't do research anyway and research has little correlation with teaching). Unfortunately, world rankings don't and can't rank entrance and grades. Dartmouth is certainly better than NYU, UT and many others for students, but it's ranked much lower. The same is true for Sciences Po, ENS in France and RUC in China.
Not just world rankings. Most rankings are stupid though.