Hi Tye, thanks for your comments - I just wanted to point out one thing about search, it has always required JavaScript. Due to the way the site is hosted by perl.org, there is no server-side processing, the entire site is just flat HTML and JS files.
For this reason a cookie-based system to suppress the noscript warning would not work, as the only way I could implement it would be to use JavaScript to read the cookie, somewhat defeating the point! :-)
Incidentally I added the noscript warning due to complaints I'd received about the previous site which did not warn if JS was disabled, just goes to show it's impossible to please everyone...