BuiltWith.com Technology Profiler Launches Today
A new technology profiling web application from Australia, BuiltWith.com, launched today. BuiltWith.com is an interesting site that reveals the behind the scenes technology that powers any web site. Unlike statistics websites, such Popuri, BuiltWith.com is not concerned with how many visits a page gets or its Google PageRank (though it does include very rudimentary statistics estimates from Compete).
Instead, it peers under the hood to see what sort of technology is being used in the creation and delivery of the web site. "BuiltWith.com's goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves," says founder Gary Brewer.
BuiltWith.com breaks stats down into 10 categories: Analytics and Tracking (i.e., Google Analytics), Widgets (i.e., Sphere), Frameworks (i.e., PHP), Publishing (i.e., Wordpress), Content Delivery Networks (i.e., Akamai), Advertising (i.e., FM Publishing), Aggregation Functionality (i.e., RSS), Document Information (i.e., XHTML Transitional), and Encoding (i.e., UTF-8), as well as a general "Site Information" category that reports the variety of web server software a site is using among other things.
The site also keep tracks of how many other sites use each technology. As more web sites are profiled using BuiltWith.com, those stats might become more useful. For example, the profile of Read/WriteWeb reveals that 37.73% sites use PHP as well, while just 6.2% of sites looked at so far include Digg buttons.
BuiltWith.com plans to make money via donations and from "featured" technologies, sold ad spots that would allow a widget provider, for example, to be featured on the page. Because the site is collecting stats on how many pages use each technology, it would be great to see pages for each with metrics over time (including the total number of sites in the database) and links to top sites using that tech.
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It's me or this isn't very accurate? At least when it comes to frameworks. I just tried 2 websites, one using Ruby on Rails and other Python. Both came as PHP.
Besides that 'little' detail, the other results appear correct.
I wonder if it guesses that if you use apache it thinks you use php. cool site and good to see them using .net
.net is a cool but gets bad press because its Microsoft based, if it was made by apple all the cool kids would be using it... :p
Seems a very useful service that could aid in making strategic decisions. However, I do believe it's the information that is gathered overtime and the ability to convert that information into useful analytics that will make the difference...
I like it! Nice to see something original come out every once in a while.
What a wonderful site! I checked TechCrunch, Digg and R/WW as well as my own blog. Details looked pretty correct, particularly in my own site's case.
Cool tool. Reminds me of a startup in the dotcom days called whouseswhat.com. Their target was enterprises as well as consumer apps and they planned to see agregated data to make $.
It was totally off for W3Counter. The site is a bunch of static pages, but it thinks I'm using Drupal CMS. The service was built with the Symfony PHP framework, but it somehow found Django (python). At least it knows that W3Counter uses W3Counter for analytics.
Hmmmm....If you check the CMS for Google.com, Facebook, Digg, and a few others, it says they use the Drupal platform.
Is this correct? It seems so....wow.
- Michael Vu
www.FantasySportsMatrix.com
The accuracy and usefulness of this site is in question. I can simply look at the code myself and come to similar conclusions, (perhaps more accurately).
I have seen several errors in detection already.
Hi, there was a small issue with some technology entries this morning this have since been fixed. Thanks for putting it on RRW Josh and Richard very much appreciated.
Hey guys, Builtwith is painfully slow this morning. Took 30 sec for home page to load and & at least a minute for a query to run (which might not necessarily be wrong but the home page is simple should load automatically).
I checked one site I'm doing some work for and picked up it was ISO/IEC 8859 for 8 bit character encoding which was interesting, however the link to what is was went back to Wikipedia, not the most reliable of sources for info!
You covering only down under start-ups now? Can I send some interesting US start-ups?
-Mike
A major issue with this is that many sites reside behind reverse proxies or other content accelerators. For example, I routinely setup reverse proxy servers on lighttpd, yet behind the scenes there may be Apache, Python, and other technologies. Tools like ModSecurity can also significantly obfuscate what is really going on. In several of the web cluster environments I tested the results only provide a small snapshot of the overall operation.