What's the deal with searching CPAN?

zentara has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

When you go to http://cpan.org you can choose between 2 search engines...search.cpan, and the Randy Kobes search engine. Well awhile ago I got messed up, because I searched the Kobes search engine for a module, and was given an old version as the current. I decided to stop using the Kobes search engine.

Then yesterday, I went to search for Class::Accessor and File::chdir on search.cpan and was sent to totally unrelated pages. BUT I did find them on the Kobes search engine.

I was going to ask about that here this morning, but I went again to search.cpan to try again this morning, and it DID find the modules.

So just what the heck is going on with these search engines?

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

Comment on What's the deal with searching CPAN?

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Re: What's the deal with searching CPAN? by jdporter (Paladin) on Apr 05, 2004 at 15:24 UTC
The two search engines are completely unrelated. In particular, Randy Kobes' search engine is running on a specific CPAN mirror which may or may not exactly match other CPAN mirrors that search.cpan.org searches. The two search engines work in different ways, too, so you're never guaranteed to get exactly the same results. Please read the kobesearch faq. jdporter The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.	[reply]
Re: What's the deal with searching CPAN? by ysth (Canon) on Apr 05, 2004 at 16:26 UTC
I use search.cpan.org all the time, but don't often use it's search facility. If I want a specific distribution, I go directly to the newest version like http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-chdir or http://search.cpan.org/dist/Class-Accessor. If there is a specific module I'm looking for but I don't know what distribution it is in, I go directly to it's doc like http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/IO::Scalar and follow the link to the distribution to download it (in this case, IO-stringy-2.109). I also sometimes look up pod documentation for specific perl versions by going to http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl and picking from the "Other Releases" menu and then following the "Browse" link.	[reply]
Re: What's the deal with searching CPAN? by JSchmitz (Canon) on Apr 05, 2004 at 16:20 UTC
I prefer to just search from the CPAN prompt it is much easier IMHO. Just type i /"module you want"/ and it will bring you up a list and then you can run the install from there. type install "module you want" I am assuming this is on a *nix system since you didn't specify otherwise cheers!! Jeffery	[reply]
Re: What's the deal with searching CPAN? by Anonymous Monk on Apr 05, 2004 at 16:26 UTC
While we are reading FAQs search.cpan has one as well. The most value will probably be gotten from comparing the two. But little is actually spelled out as the the technical details of indexing. The most helpful advice is wait a few hours, things usually clear themselves up.	[reply]