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

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Hi,

I have given up on "R" with any topic on Google quite some time
ago (because bits from fragmented postscript/pdf files show up,
for example) - but using "r-devel" with topic normally gives me
enough. YMMV.

HTL

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. 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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