What qualifies as a good proxy?

[soma56]

I'm going to write a script that determines if a proxy is good or not through cURL and I would like to know if anyone knows what qualifies a proxy as being good. Let's assume I need to do some surfing through a proxy -  that's it.

 

Is there a way in PHP to determine the 'type' of proxy? For example (elite, codeen, etc.)

 

If the proxy page exists is that all I need to run cURL through it or otherwise consider it as being good?

 

Or should I focus my attention towards simply going through the whole process of getting a 'dummy' page using cURL through the proxy and, should it succeed, it will be considered good.

 

I suppose if I can avoid the latter then the script would be more efficient. Advice and suggestions are always greatly appreciated here.

[btherl]

Fetching google.com is probably enough.  A codeen proxy will return the codeen intro page.  If you get google.com, then you might try doing a post.  If the proxy lets you get and post, that's probably a good definition of a "good" proxy.

 

If you're processing large numbers you might want to record the response time of each. and sort by that.

 

Hypothetically speaking of course.. I am in no way advocating the unauthorized usage of open proxies