I've never used Net::Google myself (or the Google SOAP API either), so I hope others can help more than I can. (E.g. I don't know whether your "local google key" value is literally a string of asterisks, or whether you're just using that to mask some actual private string assigned to you somehow by google.)

Anyway, does your "ps" comment at the end refer to the string being assigned to "$str" in that snippet, and does this explain why you have  "פרל" there instead of actual utf8 data? Have you tried doing it like this:

my $str = "\x{1508}\x{1512}\x{1500}";
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If not, try that. (Just a shot in the dark..)