R devel - Mar 2006 - Wishlist - Give R a name that shows up in search engines...

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

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
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

> 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.

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
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

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
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel