This post is a sacrilege. :-)

CPAN at this time contain ~3000 modules. If you search CPAN for something and you don't know exact module name and just search by category and keywords - your chances to find the best of existing solutions are near ZERO! As merlyn wrote some time ago - at CPAN we can found 37 modules only for CGI/HTML templates!

Comparation of some modules doing ~identical things sometimes exists in special tutorials or reviews, but you must find these reviews first and most of these reviews in fact incomplete and/or obsolette and explain only one (author) opinion.

I think that CPAN structure must be redesigned (I have no idea about how this can be done now) or at least powered with new indexes.

In last 5 hours I realize one idea about such indexes: Modules Popularity Index. As popularity criteria I take how much results will be found by Google for query:
perl module MODULE::NAME::HERE.
I'm parse http://www.cpan.org/modules/01modules.index.html and then run ~3000 queries on Google. You can see this popularity report (searchable) here.

I think what indexing algorithm must be strongly improved to make this index really usable, but now it interesting too.

Any ideas/comments about CPAN improvement?

In reply to Is CPAN usable now? by powerman

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