Automajickally POST to a remote form

Heyas, Once upon a time I used to be able to POST form data to external sites with ASP and an MSXML (or something) server object on IIS and I'm wondering if there's a similar sort of technique using PHP. Would prefer it if I didn't have to use anything that isn't part of your typical PHP/Apache install (if there is such a thing) but will take what I can get. The easiest description of what I'm attempting is: user hits PHP page, page submits predefined search terms to Google and the results are displayed. The user wouldn't have interacted with the search at all (ie: no button clicks) as it's all performed by the PHP script. Thoughts? Kris