diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 149408b..e4e232f 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
 
 
 def download_jars(datapath, version=boilerpipe_version):
-    tgz_url = 'https://boilerpipe.googlecode.com/files/boilerpipe-{0}-bin.tar.gz'.format(version)
+    tgz_url = 'https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/boilerpipe/boilerpipe-{0}-bin.tar.gz'.format(boilerpipe_version)
     tgz_name = basename(tgz_url)
     if not exists(tgz_name):
         urlretrieve(tgz_url, tgz_name)
diff --git a/src/boilerpipe/extract/__init__.py b/src/boilerpipe/extract/__init__.py
index c427209..a0068a0 100644
--- a/src/boilerpipe/extract/__init__.py
+++ b/src/boilerpipe/extract/__init__.py
@@ -28,17 +28,39 @@ class Extractor(object):
     extractor = None
     source    = None
     data      = None
-    headers   = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
+    headers   = {
+        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0",
+        "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
+        "Connection": "keep-alive"
+    }
     
     def __init__(self, extractor='DefaultExtractor', **kwargs):
+
+        if kwargs.get('logger'):
+            self.logger = kwargs['logger']
+        else:
+            self.logger = None
+
         if kwargs.get('url'):
             request     = urllib2.Request(kwargs['url'], headers=self.headers)
-            connection  = urllib2.urlopen(request)
-            self.data   = connection.read()
-            encoding    = connection.headers['content-type'].lower().split('charset=')[-1]
-            if encoding.lower() == 'text/html':
-                encoding = charade.detect(self.data)['encoding']
-            self.data = unicode(self.data, encoding)
+            try:
+                connection  = urllib2.urlopen(request)
+            except:
+                connection = None
+                if self.logger is not None:
+                    self.logger.exception( 'boilerpipe extractor failed on urlopen() for uri %s' % kwargs['url'] )
+
+            if connection is not None:
+                self.data   = connection.read()
+                encoding    = connection.headers['content-type'].lower().split('charset=')[-1]
+                if encoding.lower() == 'text/html':
+                    encoding = charade.detect(self.data)['encoding']
+                self.data = unicode(self.data, encoding)
+            else:
+                if self.logger is not None:
+                    self.logger.debug('boilerpipe execution continues with empty document')
+                self.data = u''
+
         elif kwargs.get('html'):
             self.data = kwargs['html']
             if not isinstance(self.data, unicode):