A new socket for every http-request?

Question

Do I have to make a new socket for every http-request? The code below doesn't work because it is two requests in a row. The first GET works, but the second doesn't. I thought that the purpose of a socket is that you set it up once and then you should be able to do arbitrary communication between the two peers. Maybe that is just the case with sockets only but not if you use sockets to perform http.
Thank you for your answers! Nice greetings from Austria (not Australia)!
Stefan :)
package httptest;
import javax.net.ssl.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
public class Conn2 {
    private PrintWriter out;
    private BufferedReader in;
    private Socket socket;
    public Conn2()
        try {
         socket = new Socket("www.google.at", 80);
         out = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(socket.getOutputStream())));         
         if (out.checkError())
          System.out.println("SSLSocketClient:  java.io.PrintWriter error");
         in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()));
            System.out.println("Connect erfolgreich.");
     } catch (Exception e) {
         System.err.println(e);
    public void test()
        String inputLine;
        // 1. GET
        out.println("GET / HTTP/1.0");
     out.println();
     out.flush();
     try
            while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
                System.out.println(inputLine);
        catch(IOException e)
            System.err.println(e);
        // 2. GET
        out.println("GET / HTTP/1.0");
     out.println();
     out.flush();
        try
            while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
                System.out.println(inputLine);
        catch(IOException e)
            System.err.println(e);
}

Answer 1

Normally in the HTTP protocol, the server will close the connection after every request. So after you do the first GET, the server sends you the result and closes the connection. You have to open a new connection for the second GET.
You can set specific headers to keep the connection open, which makes things faster if you have to do multiple GET's quickly after another. Lookup the specification of the HTTP protocol on http://www.ietf.org/
Maybe it's easier to use a HTTP client library like Apache's HTTPClient: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/ so that you don't have to implement all the difficulties of the HTTP protocol yourself.