[luckylion]

There should be official services for that. I'm sure Google (or in Germany, heise.de, which publishes multiple IT-related magazines since forever) sees a lot of that as well. The BBC's home page currently weighs in at around 45kb compressed or 230kb uncompressed. Imagine how much traffic is needlessly generated just by connectivity checks, not to speak of the amount of computing power.

[neurostimulant]

Some internet connectivity check endpoints I see in my home networks:

- http://detectportal.firefox.com

- http://ping.manjaro.org/check_network_status.txt

- http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204

- http://captive.apple.com

- http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt

- http://api.ipify.org

The manjaro one will respond with "NetworkManager is online" when accessed from curl, but redirect to manjaro homepage when accessed from a browser.

[xxpor]

A good use case for using HEAD instead of GET

[alex_suzuki]

Ancient wisdom… easily forgotten.

[rtkwe]

There are alternatives like simply pinging the servers or one of the many alternative DNS servers like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 that are out there.