Just when I thought I'd nailed it, CPANPLUS::Backend is just like the others I mentioned, it only returns descriptions of registered modules!

Can you define (and give an example module) of a non-registered module that you expect to appear? For example my Test::Class isn't registered and it appears in the list.

I am searching for all the Catalyst::Plugin::* modules.

They all appear, but because most of the authors haven't registered the namespace, the descriptions don't show:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp;
use Regexp::DefaultFlags;
use CPANPLUS::Backend;

my $cb = CPANPLUS::Backend->new
   or croak "Can't create new CPANPLUS::Backend object";

my @cat_plugins = $cb->search( type => 'module', allow => [ qr/\A Cata
+lyst::Plugin/ ], );

for my $plugin (@cat_plugins) {
    print $plugin->name, "\n";
    print $plugin->description, "\n";
}
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They all appear, but because most of the authors haven't registered the namespace, the descriptions don't show

Ah. Light dawns. Apologies for being dense.

The description field is part of the metadata associated with registered modules - so it won't exist for non registered ones.

Can you give an example of the text that search.cpan is showing for non-registered modules that you thought was the module description?

My guess is that it's something that's been extracted from the SYNOPSIS or DESCRIPTION sections of the POD - in which case you're going to be screen scraping search.cpan, or downloading and extracting the POD from the distribution.