To get meta information you need to connect to the actual domain and get the webserver output, which is a html page. After it you can analyse it looking for mate tags. However it seems this function was quite often requested so PHP has a built in realistion of this issue sinc PHP 3. So all you need to know to call the PHP built in function get_meta_tags().
This function takes a URL and returns a plain-text version of the page. It uses cURL to retrieve the page and a combination of regular expressions to strip all unwanted whitespace. This function will even strip the text from STYLE and SCRIPT tags, which are ignored by PHP functions such as strip_tags (they strip only the tags, leaving the text in the middle intact).
Since Alexa stopped offering their free thumbnail service last year a lot of thumbnail services are available now. Some of them offering limited free services and others only a paid premium version. On of the bigger and better services is Girafa, a thumbnail service with a free service and also premium services for users with more then 2000 image requests a month.
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