Setting "User-Agent" parameters for URLConnection for querying Google from a Java application

java httpurlconnection urlconnection google-search
Deep Wine Red picture Deep Wine Red · Apr 16, 2013 · Viewed 22.2k times · Source

I am trying to get the results back from a Google query, in Java as follows:

String urlquery = "https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=apples&oq=apples";
URL url = new URL(urlquery);
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
URLConnection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.0 Safari/532.5");

But, I don't know how to set the "User-Agent" parameters above. From where do I get the values for my system? I just copied these values from some code I found online.

My system configuration is as follows: Mac OSX 10.8.3 Intel i7 Safari 6.0.3(8536.28.10)

Answer

Alex Thaler picture Alex Thaler · Apr 16, 2013

If you just want to know what to set your user agent to so you can mimic the response that browser will get you can use this site.

http://www.whatsmyuseragent.com/

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