Need a creative idea: How can I search for all web sites that use a certain javascript library or widget?

Question

All Search engines I know of search text. I want to search for example for all the sites that use jQuery. Any creative idea on how to do that?

Answer 1

I don't know any search engines are based on code sites contain rather than content.

Koders is a code search engine (as google code search): http://www.koders.com/default.aspx?s=jquery

Maybe you could find code of a open sourced engine used in sites ?

Answer 2

My thinking is that you'd want to write a spider that does something very similar to what Opera's MAMA engine does. That is, parse page structure rather than page content.

Depending on what you want the information for, you might just be happy with perusing Opera's findings on javascript. Otherwise, you could roll your own web-crawler or tweak one of the multitude of open-source ones.

Answer 3

I think this is impossible as many sites are using minified or packaged versions of jQuery. All javascript code (both libraries and custom code) are usually combined in a single minified file.

StackOverflow uses jQuery, but I don't think you can find a reference in the hml source. You could look for uses of $ alias, but still this is used by many frameworks. The only solution I can think of is to download all javascript files and look for the license section. Most sites will respect this and leave it intact even in the minified version.