How to check if a url (or a webservice) is alive in Nodejs?

How can we check if a web service or a website is alive in nodejs? I am using node version 6.11 and express. I tried using isAlive in npm, but no luck there.

This is the one I tried, but it return false all the time.

var IsAlive = require('is-alive');
var isAlive = new IsAlive();
isAlive.add("http://google.com", 301, function (err) {
    "use strict";

    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    }
});

setInterval(function () {
    console.log(isAlive.isAlive("http://google.com"));
}, 2000);

console.log(isAlive.isAlive("http://google.com"));

I use using http as well like :

    http.get('http://google.com', function (res) {
console.log(res);

}).on('error', function(e) {
 console.log(e);

});;

And also like :

    var request = require('request');
    options = {method: 'HEAD', host: 'stackoverflow.com', port: 80, path: '/'},
    req = http.request(options, function(r) {
        console.log(JSON.stringify(r.headers));
    });
req.end();

Tried using status code as well :

var http = require("http");
http.get({host: "google.com"},function(res){
    if (res.statusCode ==200)
        console.log ("running");
        else 
console.log ("not running");


});

Can we use any other method? basically my requirement is to check if a web service which is on a different server.

Finally, I cracked this. The problem as I doubt was since I was behind a proxy. So I modified the code given by @turmuka like :

   var request = require('request');

    var link = "https://nodejs.org/";

    var proxyUrl = "http://" + user + ":" + password + "@" + host + ":" + port;

var proxiedRequest = request.defaults({'proxy': proxyUrl});

  proxiedRequest(link , function (error, response, body) {

      if(error){
        console.log('Err: '+ error);
        return false;
      }

    if(response.statusCode == 200 || response.statusCode == 201 || response.statusCode == 202){
      console.log(link + ' is up!!');
      return false;
    }

    if(response.statusCode == 301 || response.statusCode == 302){
      console.log(link + ' is redirecting us!!');
      return false;
    }

    if(response.statusCode == 401){
      console.log("you are unauthorized to " + link);
      return false;
    }else{
      console.log(link + ' is down!!');
    }

    });

So basically, I need to set the proxy in the request to make sure the proxy won't be blocking the call. Thank you very much @turmuka for the answer, really helped me to figure it out.