Occassionally the ActiveState site goes down. And on rare occassions, they reorganize their site in ways that temporarily break PPM. One symptom of breakage is a failure to find anything.

I'll wager, though, that you're behind some sort of proxy server. If that's the case, you need to teach LWP about the proxy server by setting up the environment variables. (Under the covers, PPM uses HTTP via LWP.) See ActiveState's PPM Documentation, and read the section on proxies and firewalls.