From brown at biology.utah.edu  Mon Mar  6 22:09:44 2006
From: brown at biology.utah.edu (Tim Brown)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 14:09:44 -0700
Subject: [Rd] Wishlist - Give R a name that shows up in search engines...
Message-ID: <6.2.5.6.0.20060306134952.04a69380@dandelion.org>

Hi everyone,

I know this is a long shot but I just wanted to throw it out 
there.  I have lately been using R a lot and have found that it is 
basically impossible to find any code help or answers via google 
searching because the name "R" is simply not explicit enough. For 
every other popular program or programming language a simple search 
with the name of the program and your problem brings up something 
pretty close to the answer, its usually just a matter of phrasing it 
so the results you are looking come up in your search (e.g. "find 
length of array, Matlab").  Try a similar web search for R and you 
will learn nothing -- Why? because the letter "R" is on almost every 
web page on the planet.

I'm not just whining here, I think this is a really serious problem. 
On the web, "findability" is perhaps the single most important 
feature of any product or program. The unique beauty of the Web 
anyone who solves any problem can post the answer almost anywhere 
want, a search engines will index it and serve it up to someone 
looking for a solution to that problem. Of course it doesn't quite 
work like that but its pretty close if you trying to find out how to 
program something in most languages and programs. You can't do this 
in R because its name is not unique enough, and that seriously 
hampers the ability of both new and expert users to accomplish things 
quickly.  I realize that there is the R-project website and so on, 
but the decentralized nature of the web assures that not not everyone 
will post their answers there and people such as me who search google 
first rather than going straight to a single site will have a hard 
time finding answers.

So seriously, has there ever been any discussion about renaming R so 
that people's hard work on making this kick-butt program can be 
shared and searched with the same facility that other programs enjoy. 
It could be something as simple as "R plus" ;) just anything that 
makes it unique enough that R program pages aren't indexed with 100 
billion pages that happen to have a single R on them for some reason.

Cheers,

Tim



[Rd] Wishlist - Give R a name that shows up in search engines...
Tim Brown