What Technologies Are Your Competitors Using?

Did you ever wish you knew what technologies your competitors are using for their Web site? Wish no longer, for the answers are at builtwith.com. Just enter any Web address to get a detailed breakdown of every technology a site uses.

For example, CNN.com uses the script.aculo.us JavaScript library and two online ad networks: DoubleClick.Net and AOL/Time-Warner Online Advertising. Did you know that Microsoft eats their own dogfood with a site that runs on ASP.NET, IIS, and Silverlight, all home-grown technologies? And interestingly enough, they use the same ad tracking service as Apple, which is true of 1.26% of the top 5,000 profiled sites.

You can also learn which sites support RSS from their home page (Apple does, YouTube does not), and which sites use Apache (Wikipedia does, Yahoo does not), which still appears to dominate Web server market share with 63.77% of the top profiled sites.

What I like best about this service is that it gives you a shortcut to finding and assessing the best technologies for your own online presence. If a site you trust is using technology X, they probably did their homework so it may be a good option to consider for your own site.

And finally, if you’re curious, here’s the skinny on Sundog’s site.