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Please review beewulf.com

beewulf.com

14 pointsbeewulf24 comments

Please review my website beewulf.com - detects which webserver a particular website run on. Thanks.

Simple service. If your goal is to make money of the AdSense ads, you might want to think about what kind of actions you want to encourage users to take after they've checked a domain's server, in order to increase their time on your site.

One of the things I'd add is a "How do you know?" link that talks about how you can tell what kind of server the site's using.

Also, why have social bookmarking links? Why would anyone put the results on reddit? Why would anyone expect enough others would upvote it to be worth posting?

It's also not clear that the Facebook, twitter, and digg icons are links to more sharing actions; many other sites use those size of icons to link to their own profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Thanks JayNeely, I'll add the "How do you know" info page. I'll also modify the facebook, twitter icons to something on the lines of "share this link".

Not useful for me. I would prefer to use the command-line over your service, if I wanted to know the server running a site.

    beewulf() { curl -s -I $1 | grep Server: }

Beat me to it.

redundant, use netcraft.com

What extra value does this provide me over just checking the header in firebug? Firebug also gives me a lot more information than what you are providing.

There is no extra value being returned for now. I'll try showing more info in future versions. Thanks.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I really appreciate it. More changes coming to beewulf.com in the next few days based on your feedback.

Searching for news.ycombinator.com, I get:

ERROR: Web server not shown in header.

If I search ycombinator.com, I get:

Apache/2.2.14

In the first case, I would recommend either parsing the user input to try and return some reasonable results, or just return a more direct error message.

But they do run on different web servers. The first is a custom Arc-based web service, the latter an Apache install. What could be a more direct error message than stating plainly that the information isn't available?

I don't know, maybe something accurate? Like "server header not understood by beowulf.com"?

Thank you benatkin. That's a more appropriate message to display.

I just did the same thing, and therefore have the exact same suggestion.

Looks like a cool little service, however.

Thanks jlgosse.

I guess it would be impossible to know that I run Apache as a reverse proxy to Nginx, but I was still hopeful it would pick it up.

ServerSpy Firefox plugin shows, on the status line, the server for every site you visit.

How would you go about protecting the search results, say I plan to write an App Engine clone which actually url fetches results from your service and provide an ads free interface with some more features?

Is verifying the Referrer header enough for this kind of protection?

Spoofing the referrer header is trivial and so wouldn't offer any protection in this case.

I do, however, wonder if there would be any benefit to scraping the beewulf site. Retrieving and parsing the relevant headers yourself is trivial and would remove from your hypothetical clone app any dependency on beewulf.

^ +1 Agreed.

ideamonk, I'm not storing the search results for now. In future, I plan to provide API for third-party websites to get the results.

My script does a simple PHP/Curl header retrieval to find the web server name.

What's the value of knowing what server someone runs on?

It could just be a simple project.

Maybe offer a notification when the server version changes.

needs moar grendel

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