Wow. I spent an hour on this - and found nothing. Even after looking in the module itself and trying all the examples in all the pages on perldoc.com and the ActiveState POD references.

I used this code to test a theory though:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use WWW::Search;

my $oSearch = new WWW::Search('AltaVista');
my $sQuery = WWW::Search::escape_query("FreeBSD Security");

$oSearch->native_query(
    $sQuery,
    {
        search_url=>"http://altavista.com/sites/search/web"
    });

print "QRY:".$sQuery."\n";
print "MAX:".$oSearch->maximum_to_retrieve(100)."\n";
my $response = $oSearch->response();

if ($response->is_success) {

    print "Results:\n";

    @results = $oSearch->results();
    foreach $result (@results) {
        print $result->url(), "\n";
    };

} else {
    print "error:  " . $response->as_string() . "\n";
}
[download]

The escape_query works fine (tested with several different engines even - it DOES change) but no matter what i did (even specifying the search url which i kyped directly from the AltaVista search form) it retrieved no results but DID get a response.

One other thing of note - if i gave it a bogus search_url - i still got an 'OK' response and no errors.