I use CURL a lot, and use it for google to find websites PR. Here is a snipit of what I use.

<?php
$url = "http://google.com";

$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$html = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

if (empty($html)){
print "Sorry, $url could not be found.<p>";
}else{
print $html;
}
?>