Several search engines have been written to help Perl programmers sort through the CPAN. The official search.cpan.org includes textual search, a browsable index of modules, and extracted copies of all distributions currently on the CPAN. On 16 May 2018, the Perl Foundation announced that search.cpan.org would be shut down on 29 June 2018 (after 19 years of operation), due to its aging codebase and maintenance burden.