actually today i just discovered how cool DuckDuckgo is. i queried "is HN down?" it automatically searched on those kind of sites and showed "no, HN.com seems up for us. We got a reply from <IP> in <Time> "
I thought, ooo! This looks interesting! And i tried "is news.ycombinator.com down" and it said yes, we got no reply, so that is down.
I tried the samething on google, apparently they are too stuck up to ask other sites to do this (though they did provide links to them). But I apprecaited the automatic answer more, just like i appreciate when google automatically converts currencies and fetches timezones and solves expressions.
... it did say that HN was up when it wasn't for me though.