When you browse through the internet you can reach a website that catches your attention for some technical or aesthetic reason. It may be interesting to see what the technology behind it is. In this article I will explain how to know what technology a website you visit uses.
A few years ago, I wanted to create a page for a chess school and I was documenting myself for a week seeing how I could do it and what was the best way to do it. Part of that documentation was viewing web pages and how they were created.
Multiple utility pages
There are several pages that detect which content manager uses a website or other relevant information. Among them I highlight:
- Netcraft: Netcraft is a UK-based internet services company that provides internet security services, including cybercrime search, application security testing, and automated vulnerability scanning.
- Builtwith. BuiltWith® covers more than 52,000 internet technologies including analytics, advertising, hosting, CMS and many more.
- W3Techs. The purpose of this website is to collect information about the use of various types of technologies used to create and run websites, and to produce and publish surveys that provide information on that topic.
- Rescan.io. It shows the technologies of a website.
- WhatCMS.org. This page analyzes a variety of factors to determine which CMS is using a website.
Using Builtwith
We’re going to focus on one of them, Builtwith. Once we access the page, a text box appears for us to enter an address. We put any address and returns this result:
Technology Profile tab
In the first tab we will see information such as what technology you use from web analytics and tracking. We can also see the widgets that the page uses. And perhaps the most relevant, which content manager uses the website.
Detailed technology profile
In this tab we are expanded the information of the first tab.
Data on meta profile data
Here we are shown data about the company behind it. These are company contact information, address, telephone numbers, public contact list, etc. That information for the case of amazon.com would be as follows.
In the contact list section, the person himself is not exactly searched for. These are google and LinkedIn searches for that person, but it’s not a direct link to their profile.
Relationship profile
It tells us which other pages connect to the page we are looking for. These would be domains, subdomains, and other pages that relate to the one we are looking for.
Company profile data
Here comes very interesting information about the company. Such as how much the company you are looking for spends on technology.
Using Builtwith in Other Programs
A few months ago I wrote an article on data mining with Maltego (you can see it here -> Maltego radium: Mapping Identities and Network Links on the Internet). Well, one of the transforms it has is precisely the use of Builtwith.
These transforms are particularly useful for discovering relationships between websites and for retrieving details about how they relate and the duration of the relationship (e.g., IP and tracking codes).
Maltego BuiltWith transforms are provided to Maltego users as part of the standard Maltego Transforms that any Maltego desktop client has access to. They can be used on their own to conduct research or complement other specialized integrations available in Transform Hub.
