It's with sad hearts that we are announcing that search.cpan.org will be retired on the 25th of June 2018.
Graham Barr originally wrote the site nearly 20 years ago -- it first went live in early 1999 -- and it quickly became an invaluable resource for Perl developers around the world.
The ability to search CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and read Perl module documentation online helped spark many developers interest in Perl and helped to build the Perl community.
The site was originally hosted by Washington University in St. Louis on a single Solaris box. For his work on search.cpan.org, Graham won a White Camel award in 2002.
The site was later moved to the Perl NOC. US mirrors were hosted by YellowBot and Phyber and a European mirror has been hosted by digital craftsmen for the last 10 years. These amazing people and companies helped make the site a success.
In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running 2005 era Perl code. Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over.
Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.
We would like to thank all who have assisted with this project. An extra special thanks to Graham for his hard work and unwavering support of search.cpan.org for all these years. To search.cpan.org -- we will miss you.
Update #1 (2018-05-19): There's some confusion around whether or not existing search.cpan.org URLs will continue to work. They will! The vast majority of of them will be transparently served by MetaCPAN pages. You do not need to update any links right now.
