How does builtwith.com know what script?

Hi,

Does anyone understand how builtwith.com knows what web script a site is running?

Is there anyway to stop it seeing what script is in use?

Thanks in advance

While I don't have any definite answer, I can take a few stabs in the dark.

It probably looks for meta tags that indicate what it was created with. Some CMS's use meta tags for this purpose.

It may look at the file and directory structure and match it against known patterns of common frameworks and CMS's.

It may scrape the html source. Some CMS's have HTML comments that may give it away, or sometimes there is information in the footer.

Those are my guesses.

If my guesses are accurate, then this is how you could hide the information:

- Make sure there's nothing in the page source that gives it away (meta tags, html comments, etc).

- Put your applications source code above the webroot so that only the server can access it.

Many thanks for the input, it has been puzzling me for days 

I think it may well be the directory structure but will have a good look through meta tags, html comments, etc

Thanks

Most of that can be gotten from the HTML as you can see javascript, adsense stuff, whatever.  Some is gotten from the headers: os, web server, powered-by, etc.  You can tell PHP and Apache not to expose themselves in httpd.conf and php.ini, but they can still guess if you have links to files with the .php extension on your site.

print_r(http_parse_headers(http_get('http://www.spidean.com')));

Array
(
    [Response Code] => 200
    [Response Status] => OK
    [Date] => Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:32:05 GMT
    [server] => Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
    [X-Powered-By] => PHP/5.1.6
    [set-Cookie] => POSTNUKESID=v2nuum627fnvuogik9rm17e8k3; expires=Sat, 14 Jun 2036 00:32:05 GMT; path=/
    [Expires] => Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
    [Cache-Control] => cache
    [Pragma] => no-cache
    [Connection] => close
    [Transfer-Encoding] => chunked
    [Content-Type] => text/html
)

Thanks, I have updated my httpd.conf and php.ini not to expose but still shows script in builtwith.com