At search.cpan.org, as well as within CPAN-Search-Lite, attempts are made to obtain module and package descriptions from the pod, if the CPAN indices don't have them. An alternative to downloading and extracting the pod, or using WWW::Mechanize, is to use the csl_soap script that comes with CPAN-Search-Lite to query, via a soap interface, the database that cpan.uwinnipeg.ca uses. If you set, within the script,

my $soap_uri = 
   'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/Apache/InfoServer';
my $soap_proxy = 
   'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/cgi-bin/ppminfo.cgi';
[download]

then calling the script as:

perl csl_soap --module Catalyst::Plugin::Geography
[download]

will fetch the available information from the database, including the description.

The mod_search function of PPM::Make::Util indicates how this soap service can accept an array reference of module names. Currently there isn't support for wild-card searches, but that could easily be added, if there was interest.