Spidering sites for META header content

[jgaffney]

I have a client that wants to spider the web to find META headers that contain the name of their web site authoring program, as in:

<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="name of software">

I don't think you can search on this tag via any major search engine. Or can you?

Any recommendations on spidering software for this?

[hakre]

hi jgaffney, welcome to webmasterworld.

i know that once altavista supported a search for the author of a document and i think whereever they took the info of an author from, it must be the meta tag.

on this page [searchengineworld.com] you can find out which engines support meta-tags and you have often to take the advanced search page of these to find out more / how to do it.

[jgaffney]

Thanks! Did some research on the engines listed on the page you provided, plus Fast and Teoma. Looks like none of the commercial engines expose meta header content for search, at least not the "author".