Frequently Asked Questions

How does CMS Crawler work?

The system has two main functions: a crawler, which searches the web for homepages and puts them into our database and secondly an analysis tool that analyzes the tools used at different sites.

How do you identify which tool that a web site uses?

We use different methods, first of all we look at the META GENERATOR-tag but we are also looking through the site's home page and server information for codes that are significant for different systems.

Earlier versions of the CMS Crawler was more aggressive and attempted to load multiple addresses that are unique to different systems but we received some criticism when we did so we decided to only read the website's main page.

How certain are you that you have the right data?

We are not sure at all. Our method requires first of all, that the crawler can find sites and then we need to identify the publishing tool. There are many publising tools which can not be identified at all and there are many site owners who choose not to publish META GENERATOR-tag. We also can't reach intranet or password protected sites.

But what we know is that we have very few false-positive values​​, that is if we can find a tool on a site then we feel confident that the site uses that tool.

I miss a tool that I think should be included, what can I do?

Email us at info@cmscrawler.com. In order to be able to evaluate if we can identify the tool, we need some general information about the tool and some examples of sites that uses the tool.