How to search for "R" materials? [closed]
"The Google" is very helpful... unless your language is called "R," in which case it spits out tons of irrelevant stuff.
Anyone have any search engine tricks for "R"? There are some specialized websites, like those below, but how can you tell Google you mean "R" the language? If I'm searching for something specific, I'll use an R-specific term, like "cbind." Are there other such tricks?
- rweb.stat.umn.edu
- www.rseek.org
- search.r-project.org
- www.dangoldstein.com/search_r.html
http://rseek.org is a great search engine for R manuals, mailing lists, and various websites. It's a Google syndicated search app with specialized UI. I always use it.
An update, several years later
All the links you need are right here:
https://stackoverflow.com/tags/r/info
This was discussed on the R-Help mailing list recently.
Some things mentioned there that haven't been covered here are:
Using the RSiteSearch function, and the package of the same name.
Using R-specific search engines. You mentioned RSeek and RSearch. You can also search the R mail archive, the help wiki, the task views, RForge, and Bioconductor among other places.
Most of the time I find googling for R plus my searching term works fine. When it doesn't, I'll try using "R project", or adding CRAN, statistic or language to the search.
Is there a particular topic that you're having problems searching for?
A new CRAN package is extremely helpful for this: check out the "sos" package.
I would just add, one great way to search for R script is to type your search term into google with "ext:r" at the end. This will return all files that have the R extension. For instance:
- If you wanted some high performance computing examples, this returns Russ Lenth's "R code used in Netflix analyses" from Luke Tierney and Kate Cowles "High Performance Computing in Statistics" course.
- If you wanted examples of bootstrapping, this returns many scripts, most of which look very relevant.
I usually do my basic R searches with "r-project" at the beginning, since most people who refer to R in any great detail will usually also reference the site.