What do you mean by "retrieval"? Are you going to be downloading the GIF files as a one-time thing, or is this something you're going to be regularly, ie. to update them locally or something?

Anyway, have you looked at using LWP to download the images? It does all of the HTTP work for you. If you're going to be getting search results pages back, you'll need to parse the HTML to extract the images, I presume. If so, take a look at HTML::Parser.