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?