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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/6/2006 4:09 PM, Tim Brown 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.

That hasn't been my experience.  Could you post some examples of your 
searches?

For example, "find length of array in R" turns up R-specific answers in 
4th and 9th positions on the first page of results.  Using "find length 
of array, R Project" turns up 6 out of 10 hits referencing R.

Duncan Murdoch


  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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