It works just fine on Windows too.

How many times did you try this? Did it ever return anything for you? The reason I ask is that I seem to recall that Google doesn't really like people writing their own page scrapers so they may have blocked your IP temporarily. They have their own tools they want you to use.

What you might consider trying is changing the URL that you're trying to access to see if Google is blocking your IP.

The other question I have is why you have the here doc in that snippet of code, because you're never using it. Or was it part of the larger program?