Abstract

Marriage information is an integral part of the knowledge base in any civilized society. In India, several non-government agencies as well as de-institutionalized sources provide a great variety of marriage related information in different domains of the society. Despite various modes in transferring matrimonial information, increasing use of social networks offers new opportunities for newer matrimony services. The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art of popular matrimony service portals emerged in India for providing SDI (selective dissemination of information) based personalized services to multifarious groups of the nation. Addresses of selective portals provide glimpses of current Indian activities on matrimonial information systems and services. It also examines the potentialities of the four biggest matrimonial players (viz. shaadi, bharatmatrimony, jeevansathi and simplymarry) in the country consistent with the present and anticipated needs of the marriage-information-seekers. Comparison has been carried out based on the web metrics. The paper noticed that online matrimony services would have ever-increasing importance in satisfying the objectivity of social networking practices.

Key words: Social networking, marriage information, matrimony portals, Indian matrimony.