Hi, I think an interesting angle, first to get an idea of what the problem is, and later (hopefully!) to see if we have improved the situation, is to put ourselves in the position of a Perl programer that doesn't know the community, maybe doesn't even know that CPAN exists.
Her first reflex would probably to google for perl + keyword. So let's see what she'd get for some sample keywords: perl xml perl-xml mailing list archive perl-xml FAQ perl date perl-date-time cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/ viewcvs.cgi/perl-date-time/ perl time nothing really interesting perl database recent useless article dbi.perl.org perl oracle nothing really interesting perl mysql nothing really interesting perl cgi Matt's Script Archive ??? perl mail an old article http://alma.ch/perl/mail.html perl csv 2cd hit: a 2001 page about a non-CPAN CVS module http://rath.ca/Misc/Perl_CSV/index.shtml Not great hey? (At least the Perl-XML folks got it right, props to Grant McLean!). After looking at the results, it seems to me that one of the problems here is that you can't really link to CPAN: there is no single URL for the latest docs of a module, so they are never properly indexed by search engines.A simple step would be to have a single, static, doc page for each module, generated for each new release, but with a stable and easy to remember URL. Then we can start refering and linking to it, and Google can perform its role and we shall be happy for ever after (or at least we can find something else to do with our time ;--). Generating the doc (from the POD) for each module (with a link to the tarfile or to the CPAN search page for the lates release of the module), and putting it on CPAN in something like cpan.org/docs/<module name>. If size is a problem for mirrors, then a shorter version, with just links to the docs, would work, maybe the search.cpan.org results for example: http://search.cpan.org/~timb/DBI-1.40/ could be statically generated to just http://cpan.org/docs/DBI/index.html Does this make sense? -- Michel Rodriguez Perl & XML http://www.xmltwig.com