Hello everyone, this blog entry is from a report we’ve done looking at Google and how they appear to control most of the web infrastructure! Websites that don’t have some link or usage of Google are few and far between. Checkout the report below or download this report as a PDF.

Introduction

Google is the most visited website on the internet, with an estimated 150 million visitors a month to its predominant business, search.

However, Google is not just about search, they run Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Blogger.com to name just a few of the additional services they provide.

This report which relies on information from BuiltWith Web Trends details how Google is dominant in many web technology areas.

Advertising

Online advertising provides a revenue stream for website owners and a promotion and marketing channel for advertisers. Most advertisers provide two channels, one for their advertising partners and one for web site owners.

DoubleClick

Founded in 1996, DoubleClick is one of the largest ad-serving websites in the world. Providing early day banner advertising technology it continues to sell advertising technology via its DART products. The business was sold to Google in 2007.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense provides contextual advertising by downloading a copy of the page the advertising code has been embedded into and then showing advertising in relation to the content of the page. Adsense was created from a technology called WordNet utilized by a company called Quigo, which was purchased by Google in April 2003 for $102 million.

Competitors

Tracking advertising technologies is more complicated than other technologies due to the techniques advertisers use to display advertising. Some niche advertisers actually purchase advertising off bigger partners whilst other advertisers such as Commission Junction use random domain names for affiliate links.

Atlas

Atlas is a Microsoft owned advertising solution which have less than half of Google and DoubleClick share of the sites profiled by BuiltWith Trends.

Conclusion

With Google controlling both Adsense and DoubleClick it appears Google is the biggest advertiser on the web.

Analytics

Analytics, or web analytics is gathered by measuring internet data either directly or indirectly. 3^rd Party analytics typically work by creating a javascript tag to perform certain functions such as creating a cookie (that allows return visitor tracking, bounce tracking) and testing browser functionality (version, screensize) as well as this the request provides the tracking code with information regarding the location of the visitor. All of this information is aggregated and compiled into the analytical information made available to the user.

Google Analytics

Fully introduced in August 2006, this free service provides a hugely complete tracking service for website owners, eclipsing any paid-for web analytic tools on the web and therefore becoming the most implemented analytical tool on the web as well as being one of the single largest 3^rd party technology implementation on any website.

Google Analytics is implemented on more than half of the web sites that BuiltWith Trends tracks and has been showing a steady but slow rise in usage since November 2008.

Competitors

Quantcast

Quantcast Tracking differs from Google Analytics in that it offers public visitor tracking information for websites as well as providing sophisticated information regarding audience-based profiles.

Omniture

Omniture is a public company with over 1000 employees, they target larger audience and large company websites via their large array of web technology product offerings.

Conclusion

Google is likely to stay ahead of its competitors due to its product offering being free, sophisticated and reliable.

Media

Media includes any element of a site that has an audio/visual theme. Although video media has been available on the internet for a while (typically via Windows Media Player and RealPlayer), embedded media was not as popular until Adobe Flash provided a cross-browser friendly method of embedding media into a webpage.

YouTube

YouTube is the most embedded media type as reported by BuiltWith Trends. Founded in 2005 the video uploading website provided the ability for its users to embed media into a users webpage.  Google acquired YouTube, after having limited success with their offering of Google Video, for $1.65 billion in November 2006.

Competitors

Brightcove

Brightcove is a company created in 2004 that provides Reuters syndication and has multiple partnerships with content creators. The platform bills itself as a leading online video platform that provides professional paid accounts for video production.

Vimeo

Vimeo is a large social video site with over 1 million members, also founded in 2004 it was one of the first websites to provide high definition playback.

Conclusion

YouTube embedded video content is one of the most popular embeddable video media mostly due to YouTube.com incredible popularity and reliability.

Search Engine Registration

The big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bling/Live provide methods in which a website can register itself with the search engine and provide a sitemap and control aspects of the websites details on the search engine.

To verify website ownership the search engines provide meta code or file upload verification functionality. BuiltWith can track websites that use meta code verification.

Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster tools was one of the first webmaster registration tools available. A quarter of all sites are identified as being registered with Google Webmaster Tools. As meta verification may only identify half of the sites registered with Google Webmaster, up to 50% of websites could be registered with Google.

Competitors

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer is Yahoo’s service that provides sitemap registration and URL removal requests.

Bling Webmaster

MSN / Bling Webmaster Center is a similar service for Bling Search Engines.

Conclusion

Google is extremely dominant in many areas of web technology, using its search dominance and massive global audience to promote its other products. It has gained most of these positions through acquisitions and superior product offering, in some cases offering better products for free over its charging customers.

For more information and trends visit http://trends.builtwith.com.

BuiltWith.com and the website optimizer have been relaunched.

New and Better Website Optimizer

The new website optimizer contains many new features which include better domain SEO analysis, SEO phrase monitoring, competitor SEO monitoring, technology recommendations, technology trends, page standards, network monitoring, third party ranking, social network tracking and income calculators. Take the Tour to learn about all these new features.

Note for Migrated Users

Your account has been migrated to a new system, if you would prefer to use the old optimizer it can still be accessed at  http://builtwith.opbay.com.Pro users can carry on their subscriptions and recieve the premium package on the new website optimizer.

BuiltWith.com Redesign

To bring all of the website designs under one roof the BuiltWith website has been re-skinned to match the website optimizer. Take a look for yourself.

In the recent months BuiltWith has been undergoing some huge changes. We re-engineered the main sites code to improve its speed and responsiveness. Problems with our hoster negated those factors but now the site is moving along fine with our new dedicated hosting solution.

The BuiltWith Optimizer has also been re-developed. We took all of the best bits of the optimizer and have added a lot more features which will really make the product more useful and much more polished. More to come of that in the near future but here’s a sneak peak at what the new optimizer will look like -

A release date is to be confirmed but it will definitely be in the month of May 2009.

We have just released a new feature for BuiltWith.com which makes the technology profiles a little bit more personal. Anyone who owns a domain can now customize the look of the technology profiler page by controlling what technologies we show as well as adding some useful links, information about themselves and the people behind a site and a short description and image.

Custom Profile in Action on GlobalSurfari.com

Why would I want to customize my profile?

You can correctly show the technologies your site is using. A lot of builtwith.com feedback starts “BuiltWith.com says my site is using PHP when its written in Ruby on Rails”. This is because BuiltWith finds these technologies on a site and cannot tell if they are actually in use or not. With custom profiles these redundant technologies can be hidden to give a clearer indication of what technologies are actually being used.

You can also provide contact information for the people behind the site which may attract new business and give you more exposure.

How do I customize my site?

If you own a site and can modify the homepage / upload files to the root folder then you can easily customize your BuiltWith profile. If you cannot modify the homepage or upload files but own the site you can get your administrator to upload the files for you.

Visit the domain profile (builltwith/?yoursite.com) and click the “Customize this Profile” link in the right hand column. Follow the instructions to verify your site and once complete you will be able to provide custom information.

How do I show my picture in contact details?

You need to create an account at Gravatar with the same email address you used to register. We don’t show email addresses on profile so there’s no worry about getting spammed. If you want contacts to have avatars, get them to create accounts as well.

Can I add technologies?

Not yet. We are still thinking of the best way to do this, any ideas or feedback is welcome.

Does my Optimizer login work for BuiltWith.com?

No they are currently separate, you will need to create a new login for BuiltWith.com if you have not created one before.

Where can I see it in action?

globalsurfari.com, gennit.com, garybrewer.com, twitlinks.com, builtwith.com to name a few!

We hope you enjoy the customization ability! Any feedback please place them in the comments.

When BuiltWith.com launched two years ago, many of the requests for how the website could be improved was to include more information about the statistics about the technologies that the profiler found. Well after a couple of months of publically testing the system, BuiltWith Trends finally launches. The technology trends is a natural progression for BuiltWith, having looked up millions of domains (3 million and counting) and gathering a huge list of web technologies, the trends app provides a unique insight into the most popular technologies in use on the web. The “what’s hot” page provides insight into some of the most popular technologies from recent crawls and since crawls began last December. The crawl updates every 10 days or so. The insight that the web app provides helps to show where the trends for certain technologies are going as well as allowing people to discover new up coming technologies which they could consider using themselves. Here’s a few good landing pages - Top Widget Distribution Microsoft IIS 7 Uptake Google Analytics Usage As trends in technology develop expect to see commentary right here on the blog.