I've had the title "The Annotated CPAN" swimming around in my head for a while now. Something that pretty much does what you're talking about. Between USENET, Perl Monks, and other Web Sites out there one could come up with a pretty hard core resource. (FYI, I am a fanatic when it comes to cataloging things. My all time hero is Ludwig Von Köchel, the guy who fanatically cataloged the works of Mozart.)

Here's a couple of things that I would add to what you have said:

I should say that I'm pretty pleased with the new version of search.cpan.org but there's no reason why the community can't do more...

++ for bringing this up! 

()-()
 \"/
  `

In reply to Re: search.cpan.org comments/discussion by ignatz
in thread search.cpan.org comments/discussion by grantm

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.