https://blekko.com/ is an example of a competitor which has its own index.
Perl has some nifty frameworks that can make you as productive as PHP for small web projects, and it also does large projects well.
But hey, if you're comfortable with PHP and Java, and want to pay to have your app completely rewritten, then more power to you.
New startups using perl, courtesy of Quora:
blekko
nabbr
selectablemedia.com
goba.mobi
socialflow.com
duckduckgo
Big companies writing lots of new perl, also courtesy of Quora:
Lokku (makers of Nestoria), BBC, LJ, IMDB, Salon.com, Typepad, Zappos, Craigslist, FriendFinder, Ticketmaster, Slashdot
I think you're really confused about the role Larry plays in the community. He's slowly creating a new language, which has little to do with perl 5. Perl 5 is actively maintained and has a large community of users.
The new search engine blekko is written in perl - wrote our own NoSQL database in it, too. We found CPAN to be an awesome resource; we use 600 distros from CPAN, and only found a couple of bugs in them.
It's Java that's the new COBOL. (buh dum, ching!)
Blekko's search engine and NoSQL database are written in Perl. We haven't had problems hiring experienced, smart Perl people, and we've also had no trouble getting experienced Python people to learn Perl.
How about searching for
industrial design colleges
On google, no actual colleges. On Blekko, it auto-slashtags it to industrial design
Years after producing a crappy UI for Google Groups, which was worse than the threaded text-based readers most people read Usenet with, Google finally gets a clue? Say it isn't so!
This must be a first.
MOD PARENT UP, please. Thanks!
A couple of years ago I was surprised when one of my HPC customers issued a press release saying that their machine ran Windows HPC. The high-speed interconnect we'd sold them had no Windows drivers. You can guess what was going on: MicroSoft paid for the press release, and the machine actually ran Linux.
Dawning's previous fast machine ran Linux.
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.