It looks like you are using the HttpClient API, which I know nothing about, but you could write something similar to this using core Java.
try {
HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(url).openConnection();
con.setRequestMethod("HEAD");
con.setConnectTimeout(5000); //set timeout to 5 seconds
return (con.getResponseCode() == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK);
} catch (java.net.SocketTimeoutException e) {
return false;
} catch (java.io.IOException e) {
return false;
}