We come across many different sites every single day. And every site uses quite a sizeable number of web technologies to perform various operations on themselves and also to provide a pleasant experience to the users. For example, sites may use widgets to enhance user experience on a site while using various tracking tools for internal monitoring of the site’s statistics.

Sometimes you may find some interesting feature on a website and wonder what the site uses to deliver such a feature to you. Now, using a service called BuiltWith, you are able to find details about every single technology that powers any given website of your choice.

What BuiltWith actually does is to gather information about the website you specify and displays everything to you in a clean and well organized manner. The various categories on which it retrieves information is given below.

• Analytics and Tracking:

Gives info about the tracking software used on the website like Google Analytics, 103Bees, MyBlogLog etc.

• Widgets

Gives info about widgets like Snap Preview, Digg buttons and so on.

The other details include:

• The Web Server on which the site is hosted, like IIS or Apache and the OS on the server, if possible
• The stats from sites like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast etc.
• Javascript Libraries used
• Blog publishing platform used
• The framework, such as PHP or ASP that is being used
• The aggregators used, like RSS, Atom and so on
• The document info, such as xHtml, CSS, JS
• Encoding that the site uses and also the place where it is hosted (this does not seem to be working well)

Apart from all these details, BuiltWith provides you with the percentage of the 5000 major profiled sites that use these widgets or tracking software that is used by the site you queried about. Also, you get examples of other popular sites that use these technologies as well.

The site is amazingly fast even if you want to evaluate the profile of a website for the very first time. For subsequent requests, the site profile is retrieved from cache.

The site simply checks for substrings for every technology that is being used on a site. For example, it checks for the default analytics code to verify if the site uses Analytics. If the site uses any other way of implementing Analytics, then BuiltWith may not detect it.

Thus there are a few flaws in this tool, but overall, I must say that this is a very useful tool for developers and tech enthusiasts alike. This service was launched only a week ago and I am sure that it will find a lot of takers sooner than later. Try out this service and do tell me how it worked for you. Thanks for reading!

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