"How do I set the User-Agent string in Java?" - L. Page (1996)

[donw]

Why didn't he just Googl... er... uh... nevermind.

[wlievens]

This is magnificent. I imagine decades from now, web archeology will be a true academic discipline.

[pavel_lishin]

You should read "A Deepness In The Sky" and "A Fire Upon The Deep"; the topic is actually covered fairly well.

[borism]

yes, but allow me to point out that Usenet is not exactly Web.

[frisco]

Original, for reference: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa108450...

[n-named]

And with the answer: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/browse_thread/...

[mynameishere]

Can't blame him for not googling it himself.

[huherto]

This reminds me of Doc Brown in 1955 before he invented his time machine. (In Back to the future)

[sofal]

I imagine his bot has undergone a couple of revisions since then.

[swombat]

I wonder if it still runs under Java 1.0.

[sown]

The internet has a neat ability to remember things.

[staunch]

I thought they were using Python back then? Has anyone ever talked about the structure of Google v1? Code made public?

[basugasubaku]

This is probably the closest you'll find:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[yupbank]

with the eclipse u'll never worry about such question~

[technomancy]

The hilarious bit is that they dropped Java for Python, probably due to the massive levels of frustration encountered when trying to do simple things like this.

[litewulf]

In practice, almost all core code is C++/Java (vast majority is C++, though its slowly shifting), with Python relegated mainly to scripting glue.

[axod]

Setting a user-agent isn't exactly a core language thing. HTTP is an add-on library, of which there are many to choose from.

I know you saw the title and thought "ahahaha easy time to bash Java again", but it's really ignorant to do so.

[qw]

It was simple. This is the code he had to use (assuming he used URLConnection)

connection.setRequestProperty ("User-agent", "GoogleBot/0.01");

I had never done this before and found it out by looking at the javadoc. I don't see how switching to Python would have made this easier.