[kh99]

Well, you could use the php function file_get_contents() and pass the url, but that will only work if PHP is configured to allow it. Otherwise you can try using curl, but I don't think that's included in PHP by default.

In includes/class_rss_poster.php there's code that gets RSS feeds to post as threads. It has a function called fetch_file_via_socket() which uses socket calls if curl isn't available.

That makes me think of a kind of hack - if you just need to make the request to the search engines but don't need to do anything with the page that's returned, maybe you could add them as rss feeds, and it will request them but never post anything because the return will always be invalid.