The server is sniffing the User-Agent header to decide whether to send UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. Try this code: import urllib2 r = urllib2.Request("http://www.google.de/ig/api?weather=Muenchen", None, {"User-Agent":"Mozilla/5.0"}) f = urllib2.urlopen(r) i = f.info() print(i) xml = f.read() f.close() print(xml) Neil