From ggrothendieck at gmail.com  Mon Mar  6 22:18:28 2006
From: ggrothendieck at gmail.com (Gabor Grothendieck)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 16:18:28 -0500
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>
References: <6.2.5.6.0.20060306134952.04a69380@dandelion.org>
Message-ID: <971536df0603061318x433af0f8q50f4bb6e61eaa12f@mail.gmail.com>

Note that just entering R into google will get you to the R home
page and looking for R plus some other phrase actually does
work quite often.  One can also try r-project or r-project.org
plus the phrase.

On 3/6/06, Tim Brown <brown at biology.utah.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
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>



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