See what server software any site is running

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Often times I wonder what web server and/or operating system a website is running. I usually just go to Netcraft and use their “What’s that site running?” tool. But since I’m lazy, I decided to write a bookmarklet to make this easier. Now I just have to click my Scope Server bookmarklet when on the site in question, and I get Netcraft’s site report.This doesn’t always work. The reason that Netcraft’s spiders can find out what software a server is running is because the data comes back in the HTTP headers. But the server admin might chose to turn that off, in which case Netcraft returns ‘Unknown’. But in my experience, 99% of the site’s I try return the data I’m after (using Netcraft’s tool).If you want to do this yourself, just drag this link up to your tool bar, or bookmarks folder: Scope Server, or right click it and add it to your bookmarks.By the way, Netcraft also publishes a monthly web server survey that I like to watch. Right now Apache is at about 61% while MS IIS is about 30%. One thing that bothers me about Netcraft’s survey’s is that they don’t do any data cleaning. There are millions of sites parked at hosts like GoDaddy, with no web site. Netcraft counts these, and if I were making these reports I’d try to filter that kind of stuff out.