follow.it

Questions about follow.it

How does PageSourceSearch know what follow.it is built with?

From the site's own source code. The crawler stores the exact bytes of its pages and first-party scripts; the libraries are recognised by fingerprinting that code against known releases, the identifiers are read out of the tag snippets, and the third-party hosts are the script, iframe and stylesheet sources in the HTML and the absolute URLs inside the scripts. Nothing is inferred from headers or guessed.

How far back does the history of follow.it go?

To the first crawl the timeline lists. Every crawl records what the site looked like; when a file's content changes, its earlier version stays viewable because the stored chunks are never deleted, only mapped. A crawl that finds a file unchanged adds no copy.

Can I see an older version of a script from follow.it?

Yes. In the stored files list, every date under a file opens the version that was live at that crawl, with the same viewer as the current one. The raw bytes can be downloaded from there.

Which other websites use the same tracking IDs as follow.it?

Each identifier links to its reverse lookup, the list of every site in the index whose source carries the same id: the sites one analytics property or tag manager container is shared across.