It's not much harder to use LWP::UserAgent so that you can get the response status when it fails.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::UserAgent;
use strict;
my $url =
 "http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=machine+learning";

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->env_proxy;
$ua->agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows)");
my $response = $ua->get($url);
 
if ($response->is_success) {
     print $response->content;
} else {
   die $response->status_line;
}
[download]

However, you may be interested in the Google web APIs, for which there are modules (Net::Google and DBD::Google) on CPAN.

Also, if you are interested in just getting the text of a web page, you may find it easier to use "lynx -dump" than perl. You can use it under cygwin on Windows.