[Rd] Wishlist - Give R a name that shows up in search engines...
Jeff Gentry
jgentry at jimmy.harvard.edu
Mon Mar 6 22:26:07 CET 2006
> 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.
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