Put something in between your browser and AltaVista and
see what the browser sends.

You already have User-Agent, but maybe it wants Referrer or
Accept or Accept-Language or Accept-Encoding.

Or maybe it wants HTTP/1.1 (which requires Host).

There is a limited number of things to add until
you are fully browser compatible.

Arne

This seems to work (once I managed to spell alta-vista with both Ts -
shouldn't have repeated myself):

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

class Search {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Socket s = new Socket("www.altavista.com",80);
        String request =
"GET /web/results?q=java HTTP/1.1\r\n"+
"Host: www.altavista.com:80\r\n"+
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;rv:1.8.1)
Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.\r\n"+
"Connection: close\r\n\r\n";
        OutputStream out = s.getOutputStream();
        out.write(request.getBytes());
        out.flush();
        InputStream in = s.getInputStream();
        for (;;) {
            int b = in.read();
            if (b == -1) { break; }
            System.out.print((char)b);
        }
    }
}

Tom Hawtin

Try opening the socket to "www.altavista.com"

Its not the same host as  "altavista.com". You can see the difference by
pinging them both and looking at the IPs and true host names.