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Hoogle helps for Haskell projects, as you can search by Type, and the Types are expressive enough that that actually finds what you're looking for most of the time.

You can also search by function and module name.

Neil Mitchell, the author of hoogle, has some idiosyncratic ideas about what to search over in hoogle. If you want a more expansive search, give hayoo a try.

> - How do you search for a function other than by description or name.

You were asking for modules and now you're down to the function level. That's a much easier problem to solve. Hoogle, Javadoc, documentation and good index engines solve this problem easily.

Note that type only is pretty ambiguous and most of the time useless without additional metadata. Types tell you what, they don't tell you why or how.

> - When multiple modules are returned, similar packages, how do you compare and select efficiently without wasting hours reading the code, evaluating it, checking if it is still maintained and hoping there are no hidden bugs etc.

At some point, the human brain has to step in and make a call. You can't expect an automated tool to dictate to you the code you need to write.

A random thought. Linting and static analysis tools for code smells might be correlated with bad code, in which case a tool that let you see that package A has huge monolithic functions and poor test and Package B is modular and simple and good test coverage might be a good way to decide between modules that do the same thing.