Added a structure to control spread/general-purpose parameters on queries.

Main purpose (so far used) is the 'timeout' parameter used when querying
 a service through urllib2.urlopen() method. The implemented functions
 give an interface at the level of the query module to control parameters
 used by the object(s) inside query.py.

*There are two other methods -- Record.getdataset and Record.cachedataset --
 that use the urllib2's timeout parameter, but I did not change because
 is is not clear to me how they are being (if so) used.