Perhaps you could just be more narrow in your searches with `npm search`? Perhaps instead of searching for "asset management" you could just search for a tool that does browser javascript bundling and then search for another tool that does css bundling. There are fewer of each of those and you can refine your search further by looking for specific things like bundlers that do node-style require()s versus AMD-style requires.

Plus, on http://search.npmjs.org you can see how many people have starred a project. You can star a project yourself with `npm star`. For a lot of projects you can click the home page or github links from the project page too. These are really useful to get a quick glance of what the API is like. If a project doesn't have either of these then it probably isn't worth using.