diff --git a/Changelog b/Changelog
index 3e20167f0..135c595ab 100644
--- a/Changelog
+++ b/Changelog
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
     - BUGFIX: Only one program preferences dialog is allowed at a time
     - BUGFIX: Link against boost and ssl to fix issues with gold linker
     - BUGFIX: Fix memory leak in RSS
+    - BUGFIX: Improved HTTP gzip compression detection in downloader
 
 * Mon Feb 8 2010 - Christophe Dumez <chris@qbittorrent.org> - v2.1.4
     - BUGFIX: Fix file prioritizing in a torrent
diff --git a/src/downloadthread.cpp b/src/downloadthread.cpp
index 957874073..c7e5ca9be 100644
--- a/src/downloadthread.cpp
+++ b/src/downloadthread.cpp
@@ -103,6 +103,7 @@ void downloadThread::downloadUrl(QString url){
   // Spoof Firefox 3.5 user agent to avoid
   // Web server banning
   request.setRawHeader("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5");
+  request.setRawHeader("Accept-Encoding", "");
   qDebug("Downloading %s...", request.url().toString().toLocal8Bit().data());
   networkManager->get(request);
 }
diff --git a/src/search_engine/helpers.py b/src/search_engine/helpers.py
index a9ae7f464..6d7a408db 100644
--- a/src/search_engine/helpers.py
+++ b/src/search_engine/helpers.py
@@ -84,15 +84,14 @@ def download_file(url, referer=None):
         req.add_header('referer', referer)
     response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
     dat = response.read()
-    # Check if data is gzip encoded
-    response_info = response.info()
-    content_encoding = response_info.get('Content-Encoding')
-    if content_encoding is not None and 'gzip' in content_encoding:
+    # Check if it is gzipped
+    if dat[:2] == '\037\213':
         # Data is gzip encoded, decode it
         compressedstream = StringIO.StringIO(dat)
         gzipper = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=compressedstream)
         extracted_data = gzipper.read()
         dat = extracted_data
+        
     # Write it to a file
     file.write(dat)
     file.close()