I just happen to come across this blog written by Simarprit Singh, co-founder of Infobase and mapsofworld. He recently released a report on India’s top 20 most useful sites and the ranking has been done by collating over 30 parameters.
This is actually a detailed report developed by him by analyzing over 2000 sites and over 200 hours of work.
Here are the criteria based on which the “Usefulness” ranking was developed
Criteria of Study
- Age Group Penetration
- Alexa Rank
- Back Links
- Blog References
- Competition Analysis
- Content Relevancy
- Crawled Pages\
- Data Provided by Quantcast
- Digg/ Delicious/ Stumbleupon
- Directory & Search Engine Penetration
- Domain Analysis
- Entry Barrier
- Feedback and Mail handling
- Geographic Penetration
- Google Page Rank
- Homepage Update Frequency
- Likely Page views
- Likely Unique Visitors
- Navigation
- Page Not Found Analysis
- Quality Orientation
- Recommendation Analysis
- Response Management
- Subdomains Penetration
- Thought Leadership
- Time Spent on Site Analysis
- User Interface
- User Retention Analysis
- User Review Analysis
- Vertical Penetration
Now this is one exhaustive list of criteria based on which the rankings have been made:
And here is the The Authoritative List of India’s Twenty Most Useful Websites
Note: The list with one parameter and Useful Ranking is being made public.
| Website | Google PR | Google PR Rank | Useful Rank |
| Rediff.com | 7 | 3 | 1 |
| IRCTC.co.in | 8 | 1 | 2 |
| Indiatimes.com | 7 | 3 | 3 |
| BSNL.in | 8 | 1 | 4 |
| Naukri.com | 7 | 3 | 5 |
| Cricinfo.com | 7 | 3 | 6 |
| BharatStudent.com | 7 | 3 | 7 |
| NDTV.com | 7 | 3 | 8 |
| MapsofIndia.com | 7 | 3 | 9 |
| IndiaMart.com | 6 | 10 | 10 |
| HDFCbank.com | 6 | 10 | 11 |
| BookMyShow.com | 6 | 10 | 12 |
| Magicbricks.com | 6 | 10 | 13 |
| Sulekha.com | 5 | 15 | 14 |
| ibibo.com | 5 | 15 | 15 |
| Shaadi.com | 5 | 15 | 16 |
| Clickindia.com | 5 | 15 | 17 |
| ICICIdirect.com | 5 | 15 | 18 |
| Makemytrip.com | 5 | 15 | 19 |
| Redbus.in | 6 | 10 | 20 |
Here is the interesting part – There is one site that finds its way up on the 9th position is MapsofIndia, which I have personally never visited, neither did I think that it was one of the top 10 sites in India. But it is there ! I think all other sites I have visited one or the other time.
On the other hand it is actually quite surprising that in.com, which I thought was pretty well placed in India does not figure in top 20, neither does moneycontrol, which probably is the mecca for all kind of stock, finance related updated.
For me it is extremely hard to digest that sites like Ibibo, mapsofIndia, redbus (btw, I am a fan of this ) are more useful than Moneycontrol.
I would actually love to look at the detailed report on this, but the author has put a price tag of $25,000/- on it – Cant even think of it !
Whats your opinion on this list?
Author: Arun Prabhudesai
Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at 91.9822575676.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Are you sure its $25000? Even a Gartner/Forrester report won’t cost that much. Clickindia and Mapsofindia among the top 10…hmm…it’d be fun to look at the methodology..ah well, probably the tagline of the report is ‘a report you can’t afford to buy’…so there!
Kiran…Check out the blog link that I have given in the first line…and would you believe that author calls it Nominal charge….
I think the mistake he has made is that it is Rs. 25000/- instead of dollars…I am nearly 100% sure of it..
I rechecked again just for the heck of it…and it is really $25000 !
His quote
where is icicibank.com or icicidirect.com, the biggest private bank’s sites? looks like a sponsored research to me ;)
another major name that i think is missing is justdial.com
i think the reason why this is priced at $25000 is so that no one can check what has gone inside the making of the report!
Hehehe Palash,
I think that must sure be the reason why it is priced so hight…There is no question of debate if no one sees it…
What ever happened to timesofindia, hindustantimes, bharatstudent, makemytrip and their ilk? What’s even fishy to (ignorant?) me is that the results of the report – top 20 of the 2000 websites analysed, which should be the reason to buy the report, is already made public and the report is priced soooooo high so as to dissuade anybody from purchasing it. So, agree with Philip that it could be a sponsored report!
Sounds like one of those statistical things…you can always find some way of projecting what you want to project.
Sulekha and Shaadi’s Alexa ranks (especially in India) are way higher than mapsofindia.com which even i have never used. These are just two sites that i checked. Didnt compile an exhaustive list to compare all of them.
Hi Arun,
Even I dont like mapsofindia.com on the face of google maps and google earth.
But MapofIndia has got superb SEO done .. whenever you are searching for any city address or pin codes or any term which has an indian city name in it, this site will pop in in first five in google… so probably that is the reason it has been mentioned in the list..
I cant digest Redbus though…
Well, where does this all data comes from? I generally look into http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/IN in order to understand latest trends in india and that one is more digestable than the list of this post.
I’m not trying to say that the above list is fake or wrong, I’m just wondering the way things are measured by different analytics companies.
anyways to conclude, If you go to above link, most of them are social network sites and indian railway site.
Good news is, day by day, indian sites are making place in indian internet users, and that is a good sign! what you say?
I would not read this report even if it was free! ;)
May be corporations that have deep pockets and want to spend unnecessarily will… :)
Arun, why don’t you post list of your favorite indian websites those have reasonabaly well mass apeal? Leave this report behind.
Mine are,
irctc.co.in
rediff.com
icicibank.com
cricinfo.com
redbus.in