Database of Software

Question

I'm looking for a database of commonly installed Windows software. At minimum I need the name of the software and the executable name, but it'd also be nice to have the publisher and the common installation path, etc. Basically, I'd like to be able to query it to find all the software by Adobe and the associated executable name, etc.

Basically I'm looking to be able to do

SELECT * FROM Software WHERE Publisher = 'Microsoft' 
SELECT * FROM Software WHERE Executable = 'devenv.com'

I came across an effort to create such a database a long time ago, but can't seem to find it now. Maybe it fizzled out. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can do some screen scrapping with some website that contain list of software and build yourself a database of all software and publisher.

Here is some website that contain some list of software:

• http://www.digital-digest.com/software/index.php
• http://www.bestshareware.net/allsoftware-w.htm

Answer 2

Your best bet would be to query amazon.com, since they sell lots of software and provide public interfaces to access their database.

Answer 3

here is the list of applications compatible with windows vista.

there is a excel sheet out there at microsoft, you can find more software products.

http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Windows_Vista_Software_Compatibility_List

hope this helps

Answer 4

So, someone asked a question on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7civs/ask_prog_where_can_i_find_lists_of_data_in_useful/) that contained the original website I was looking for.

Anyone looking for a database of general information (including the database of software I was looking for) can find it at http://www.freebase.com/.

There were also a couple other interesting open databases at http://infochimps.org/, http://theinfo.org/ and http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web

Answer 5

Secunia, the security company, has a tool called Secunia PSI that attempts to list all the software on a Windows computer and checks it against a database of known vulnerabilities, so you can keep your stuff up to date. This might have some overlap with what you are trying to do.