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by hbar 5332 days ago
...Read the HTTP headers? I think you answered your own question.
2 comments
maw 5332 days ago
I think GP meant that they hide that info even in their headers, such that you can't just see what's in Server:.
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JonoW 5332 days ago
As @maw said, most top sites remove the http headers that identify the web-server. Also, if you had to take the top, I don't know, 10k sites by traffic, I would imagine all of them use a load-balancer, so how can netcraft know what the web-server is behind them?
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chc 5332 days ago
Top sites? I think probably a few of these would quality:

CNN.com — Server: nginx

Netflix.com — Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1

YouTube.com — Server: Apache

Wikipedia.com — Server: Apache

Twitter.com — Server: tfe

LinkedIn.com — Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1

Granted, this does not give you a good picture of their network topology, but in general they do report something that Netcraft can use.

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mst 5332 days ago
Right. The version is often stripped out, but the server software tends to stay in there.

Totally possible there's extra heuristics in there though; I totally can't remember from when I ran that thing but it took about a week to run and spent most of its time waiting on other people's servers, so burning a bunch more CPU doing extra analysis wouldn't cause Netcraft any issue at all, I don't think.

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