code: def get(self, url, status):
          
  
          # consistently faster than requests by 3x
          #
          # r = requests.get(url,
          #                  headers={'User-Agent': self.user_agent})
          # return r.text
  
          crl = self.cobj
  
          try:
              crl.setopt(pycurl.URL, url)
          except UnicodeEncodeError:
              crl.setopt(pycurl.URL, url.encode('utf-8'))
  
          if not self.silent:
              print(status, file=sys.stderr)
  
          if self.DISABLED:
              print("Requests DISABLED", file=sys.stderr)
          else:
              return self.curl_perform(crl)
docs: in favor of python-requests for speed