public function send()
    {
        $ch = curl_init();
        $url = $this->_url;
        $d = '';
        $this->_params['format'] = 'xml';
        $this->_params['key'] = self::$apiKey;
        // The language to retrieve results in (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1 for the language codes (first
        // two characters) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes for the country codes (last two characters))
        $this->_params['language'] = 'en_us';
        foreach ($this->_params as $key => $value) {
            $d .= $key . '=' . $value . '&';
        }
        $d = rtrim($d, '&');
        $url .= '?' . $d;

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'gzip');
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        // Ignore SSL warnings and questions
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);

        $r = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
        try {
            $r = new SimpleXMLElement($r);
        } catch (Exception $e) {
            return null;
        }
        return $r;
    }