According to Mr Simarprit Singh, chairman and managing director of Compare Infobase, "This portal is the cousin of mapsofindia.com. It would be totally dynamic in nature with geographic content. It would be database driven".

This means that if on mapsofindia.com you can find your way from one city to another, on gisofindia.com, you can plan your route from a specific location in a particular city to another, Mr Singh explains adding this would mean relationship between two places in dynamic form. The company has already invested Rs 70 lakh in the portal and has roped in two partners who have invested Rs 3.5 crore together.

Also, by March 2001, all the portals would be available in 11 European languages. The content and other services would soon be available in German, Swedish and Spanish, Mr Singh said.

Elaborating on the plans for mapsofindia.com, Mr Singh said that propelled by the popularity of mapsofindia.com, the company is launching mapsofindia CD in April 2001. It is also working on a project to bring out the mapsofindia atlas this calender year.

Mapsofindia gets 60 per cent of the traffic from US - of this 20 per cent comes from .edu and the rest from .com, .net, .us and .gov.

Europe accounts for 20 per cent of the traffic while India accounts for 10 per cent. The rest of the 10 per cent comes from the rest of the world.

A site for the unlikely of the unlikeliest
Here is one site where you can find the unlikeliest of maps - beaches of India, stock exchanges of India, dental health map of India.

It's no wonder then when the massive earthquake hit Gujarat, the portal registered unprecedented rush with the result that it had to activate headlinesindia.com to diversify the quake related information traffic there.

The site went live on January 28 - two days after the quake and has registered 1.8 million hits till February 16. It has now become a prime information exchange site.