Sweden uses internet best among 61 countries, says World Wide Web Foundation’s Web Index

The World Wide Web Foundation's Web Index, which measures the web's "growth, utility and impact on people and nations," has given Sweden the top score in its 2012 ranking of countries.

The "first-of-its-kind report," as CNN dubbed it, looked at quantitative measures of the internet's use and impact in 61 countries to come up with its scores. Those included assessments of communications infrastructure, policies on web access, content available to users, and the use of the internet for both social networks and business ventures, according to the World Wide Web Foundation's website.

After Sweden, the United States was ranked second, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Norway.

The foundation, working with Oxford Economics, conducted surveys and analyzed data amassed by various sources over five years, CNN reported. The $1 million project was initially funded by Google, according to Wired. 

Wired noted that Kazakhstan showed the greatest growth over the years analyzed, "climbing 18 positions between 2007 and 2011 thanks to a rapid increase in internet use."

Still, the report found that around the world, among the countries surveyed, only one in three people — in Africa, one in six — uses the web, according to VentureBeat.

All of the raw data used to create the index is posted online, where Tim Berners-Lee, who head's the World Wide Web Foundation, hopes others will put it to good use. "Who knows what some school kid or journalist will do with the data?" he asked, according to Wired.