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Err... Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Chrisopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, and quite a few others will be surprised when they find out that they are not American!

Err... Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Chrisopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, and quite a few others will be surprised when they find out that they are not American!

I suggest you try https://duckduckgo.com/ for searches like that - regexes, content categories, site-specific, all sorts of "goodies".

It hasn't replaced Google's other search modes for me, but feels like the first real good competitor for the standard web-search.

And BTW, They cater well to the privacy-concerned - they don't keep any info on you, use a redirect to remove your search terms when you click on a result, and will gladly operate over SSL for anything

http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

That's just those using Catalyst (a popular Perl based Model View Controller system) but if you glance down the list you are going to see some huge sites with big, big traffic loads. All new stuff, things launched within the past two/three years max. BBC iPlayer alone is one of the heaviest hit sites on the web, and that's Perl.

So you are wrong in your guess that "80%" of Perl programmers are sysadmins writing cron jobs. Whoever modded you up should have done a bit of checking, because marking your opinion as insightful is highly inaccurate.

There have been several new Perl books written just for Catalyst in the past two years, so just because you are not finding anything new for Mason (which is probably not the framework of choice for the modern Perl programmer anyway) that is not much of an indicator. There's tons of FREE docs and examples for Perl in any case (http://search.cpan.org/)

As far as Google's lack of commitment to Perl, well, I'm sorry to hear about that, but that's one company. Google Appengine is a pretty small garden, and the Perl interpreter has trouble running under its confinement. To be honest, Python doesn't run everything under appengine either, you need to write code for appengine. I think getting PHP or other languages to run under it will be equally difficult.

If you want to program in Perl on the cloud you have a ton of options, such as EC2, Rackspace cloud and pretty much any cloud provider with an open system (not Appengines walled garden) Oh, and if you want a smarter search engine, trying http://duckduckgo.com/, which is written in Perl and I find more useful than Google search.

I realize that the Perl community needs to do a better job showing that we are not stuck in 1998, so I forgive your lack of knowledge in this matter. I do actually appreciate the opportunity to discuss it, since this is really the only way this perception problem with be solved. However I hope you can meet me halfway and do a bit of checking on modern Perl before you make such sweeping judgments again. Because to be honest this exact opinion you've expressed I've seen over and over again for several years, and it's totally different from what I see everyday, as a fulltime, highly paid Perl programmer for at least 15 years. Take a look at Moose (http://moose.perl.org/) if you think Perl's OO is lagging, or Plack (http://plackperl.org/) if you think Mason and mod_perl is all we have, for example. Our community is smart, diverse, highly active and strongly focused on the next 20 years of Perl.

John Napiorkowski

There's an add on that lets you change the default search engine in Safari. Mine is set to use DuckDuckGo; nice UI, decent search results, good privacy policy, very silly name.

Of course, this doesn't mean that they have to retain the information or store it in a personally identifiable form. I've recently started using DuckDuckGo, which manages to have an even more silly name than Google and a much better privacy policy. It also has a much nicer user interface (especially after Google's recent changes). I haven't done an objective comparison of its search results to Google's, but so far (I've been using it for about three weeks) the only times it hasn't given me a helpful result, Google hasn't either.

DuckDuckGo has had an encrypted option for some time now. In addition, even on HTTP requests, the search engine itself goes through great lengths to make sure not to log any IP addresses or identifying information (meaning you're still sending Referral headers to requested pages, but the search engine itself has no log at all of what you've searched).

I've been playing around with duckduckgo and it does something like this. For example, the query for "saturn" at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=saturn starts off with

Saturn can mean different things. Which one?
(Some meanings grouped into sections Aircraft, ships and other vehicles, Arts and entertainment, Computing and electronics, Fiction, and Other.)

I'm sure coverage for something like that is hit-or-miss at best, but it's pretty cool

Goduckgo has a similar feature that works well with Google search results. It uses SSL and keeps Google/adsense from data-mining your workday procrastination.

I used to use Scroogle for privacy reasons, but switched to Duck Duck Go a few weeks ago. It is quickly becoming a great privacy-respecting alternative to Google and often gives more relevant results than Google.

Duck Duck Go is Amazing!!!!!!!! Thank you Mr. Duck!

I too have been trying Duck Duck Go (link to encrypted version) for the last several weeks and have been impressed.

Furthermore, check out their privacy policy, as well as a recent blog post about search privacy that explains why it "might be the most private place to search the Internet". No IPs logged, no cookies, no contractors.

There are also a large set of convenient "bang commands" such as searching "!slashdot foo".

And finally, searching over (encrypted) HTTPS just works "out of the box".

Give it a try for a few weeks!

I too have been trying Duck Duck Go (link to encrypted version) for the last several weeks and have been impressed.

Furthermore, check out their privacy policy, as well as a recent blog post about search privacy that explains why it "might be the most private place to search the Internet". No IPs logged, no cookies, no contractors.

There are also a large set of convenient "bang commands" such as searching "!slashdot foo".

And finally, searching over (encrypted) HTTPS just works "out of the box".

Give it a try for a few weeks!

I too have been trying Duck Duck Go (link to encrypted version) for the last several weeks and have been impressed.

Furthermore, check out their privacy policy, as well as a recent blog post about search privacy that explains why it "might be the most private place to search the Internet". No IPs logged, no cookies, no contractors.

There are also a large set of convenient "bang commands" such as searching "!slashdot foo".

And finally, searching over (encrypted) HTTPS just works "out of the box".

Give it a try for a few weeks!

I used to use Scroogle for privacy reasons, but switched to Duck Duck Go a few weeks ago. It is quickly becoming a great privacy-respecting alternative to Google and often gives more relevant results than Google.

http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
They don't keep search logs. I am not connected in any way other than occasionally using it.