How to interact with google search engine using java HTTP POST

Question

I am trying to develop an desktop app that acts as an online radio tuner. I want to use google as an index site for actually searching for radio stations online. So I was wandering if it is possible for me to use java to actually interface with the google search engine servers. For example, I have built a gui that allows you to enter search text. This gui will connect to the web. I would like it to connect to the Google site and post the query to the google web servers. Then i would like to began to parse the response( html page) that i get back from the google servers. Like using google without actually typing in the text field on the google site. Can anyone tell me if it is possible to do this with java. If so, what would be the best way to go about doing this. Thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks for the response. It was actually alot easier to do than I anticipated. All I had to do was create a URL object initialized with the google url(search text embedded in the url - http://www.google.com/search?q=" + searchText + "&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8).
Looks like this:
String google = http://www.google.com/search?q=" + searchText + "&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8;
URL url = new URL(google);  // creating Google Url object
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
       connection.setDoOutput(true);
       connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" );  // fooling google servers into thinking the request is coming from a real browser
       BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));The content returned by the google server can be accessed calling the BufferedReader class methods.