Search engines like Google scour the web to figure out how to rank content. Measurement firms like comScore sample users to estimate traffic to web sites. But what if you want to know which of some 2000 technologies a web site is using? And, what if you want to know what the tech trends are across the 130 million largest sites on the web today?
You could just dig through the source code for each site you’re interested in to answer these questions piecemeal, or you could repurpose other web site profilers designed for search engine optimization or other jobs.
Or, you could use BuiltWith.
The five year-old bootstrapped startup, built by one-man team Gary Brewer in Australia, looks at the publicly available code for each site, and figures out each piece of technology that it’s using. It shows that TechCrunch, for example, is using the WordPress VIP content management system, ad targeting from Quigo and AdSonar, traffic measurement from comScore, ChartBeat, Optimizely, Google Analytics, and many others. It also shows all the Javascript libraries and widgets that we’re using, including Facebook for Websites, JQuery, and the Twitter Platform. You can take a look at the full results here.
Organized, easily accessible data about the profile of any one web site can be valuable for, say, someone trying to sell cloud hosting or ad network products to new clients — especially for figuring things out like which clients are already using competitors’ technology.
But even more interesting are the big-picture trends that BuiltWith reveals. By aggregating the data about usage across all of the sites that it tracks, BuiltWith can show which web technologies are gaining or losing in usage across the web. Some examples:
Adobe’s Shockwave Flash embed technology has been seeing steady declines over the past couple years. Among the 10,000 largest sites on the web, its market share has declined from 13.71% in January of 2011 to 9.88% last month.
JQuery, a Javascript library, has been blowing up. From 21.88% of the top million web sites in January of 2011, it has reached 33.92% last month.
What about Facebook’s efforts to introduce its widgets and other platform services around the web? BuiltWith shows that the Facebook SDK is now being used by 747,588 sites around the web, and grew by 0.29% between February 5 and 12. Facebook for Websites, which includes social plugins, along with its Facebook Connect authentication service and other platform features, now has 1.35 million sites on board; it grew by 0.14% over the same period. The Like button itself is used by 1.12 million sites. Check out the full list on the BuiltWith Trends site.
How is BuiltWith monetizing all this publicly available but painful-to-aggregate data? Through a professional version called Trends Pro that lets people buy access to run custom reports across its database. Each report comes with further details on each included site, such as available contact information, and includes options to export to spreadsheets or into your company’s customer relationship manager software.
At this point, Brewer is focused on fine-tuning Trends Pro, and building out a team who can help him sell the product. He says he hasn’t ruled out taking funding but for the time being wants to see how far he can get by bootstrapping. Considering how much he’s managed to build over the last five years, I’d bet he’ll make it pretty far.
BuiltWith is a web site profiler tool and competitive analysis and business intelligence tool providing technology adoption and usage analytics for the internet. Upon looking up a page, BuiltWith returns all the technologies it can find on the page. BuiltWith’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. BuiltWith technology tracking includes widgets (snap preview), analytics (Google, Nielsen), frameworks (.NET, Java), publishing (WordPress,...
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