A method and system for locating assets is disclosed that provides the capability for the gathering of information about assets contained in data repositories and the capturing of the gathered information in a database which can be used for the conducting of subsequent searches. By integrating into the system a series of data analyzers that are specific to each type of data contained in the repositories (e.g., a Java analyzer, a C/C++ analyzer, a COBOL analyzer, an HTML analyzer, and/or an XML analyzer) the system can be used to search the repositories using conventional keyword-searching techniques, as well as by searching for particular attributes specific to a particular language, or by combining keyword-searching with attribute-specific searching.