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.