From jgentry at jimmy.harvard.edu  Mon Mar  6 22:26:07 2006
From: jgentry at jimmy.harvard.edu (Jeff Gentry)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 16:26:07 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Rd] Wishlist - Give R a name that shows up in search engines...
In-Reply-To: <6.2.5.6.0.20060306134952.04a69380@dandelion.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.20.0603061621440.15003-100000@santiam.dfci.harvard.edu>

> 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.

FWIW using Teoma (I've been (probably unwisely) boycotting Google of
late), the search 'find length of vector R' points to mostly responses
about the R language.  Also FWIW it appears the same is not true of
Google.  Although I'm too lazy to try more than this one example (as I
didn't intend it to be a search engine comparison) I wonder if something
like "R" might not just be very Google-friendly while not being bad in
various other search engines.

Regardless I realize that more esoteric searches likely won't have the
same R-centric responses as was the case here.

> 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.

I've found that putting r-project as a search string is not very limiting
as the bulk of stuff like you're looking for ends up in these mailing
lists.  Also a lot of other sites with R based info/help tend to link to
r-project anyways (and thus should get picked up).  Not perfect but not as
dire a situation as you make it sound, IMO.



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