

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

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beewulf
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".

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alxv
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: }

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Zarathu
Beat me to it.

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elouise
redundant, use netcraft.com

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furtivefelon
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.

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

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beewulf
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.

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riffer
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.

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enneff
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?

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

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

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Locke1689
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.

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

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ideamonk
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?

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webignition
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.

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ideamonk
^ +1 Agreed.

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TheSOB88
What's the value of knowing what server someone runs on?

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colbyolson
It could just be a simple project.

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J3L2404
Maybe offer a notification when the server version changes.

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anigbrowl
needs moar grendel

