Easily search for online help about R

R is a very good open-source statistical package. It has a built-in help system which documents all functions currently available. This is nice once you know the name of the function adapted to your particular need. Yet, very often, you know what you want to do with your data but don’t know how to do it in R. Since “Google is [usually] your friend”, you take your browser on a cruise to search for the name of the particular function or package which implements your needs (and it has got to be somewhere, there are so many of them!). Unfortunately, R’s name (chosen from its predecessor, the S language) is not exactly Google friendly: adding the letter “r” to your search keywords does not help much in focusing results. Depending on the other keywords in your search, you will usually get a few nice results between loads of garbage and piles of crap. Those few nice results are most often messages on R-help mailing list. So, why not get information directly at the source?

The first step is therefore to restrict the search to R-Help mailing list archives hosted there: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/. Just add site:https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/ to your Google query or use the advanced search form to specify your search preferences

This allows you to get only results on R-Help mailing list. Ok, not too bad. But going trough Google’s advanced search page every time is not really convenient.

The second step, which makes all this really useful, is to leverage Gecko based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino…) custom bookmarks keywords. This highly cool functionality allows you to use some search engines directly from the address bar, by creating special bookmarks, with a shortcut. Create a bookmark, enter the address of a query on the desired search engine, replace your keyword by “%s”, assign it a shortcut and you’re done. For example with this bookmark setup:

• Title: Google
• Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
• Shortcut: g

you can type “g apple” in the address bar to search Google for pages about a very cool fruit. The search query can include spaces, special characters and all. Now we just need to modify this to search only R-Help and we’ll have our own custom search engine for R-related stuff. This setup does the trick:

• Title: R-Help
• Location: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fstat.ethz.ch%2Fpipermail%2Fr-help%2F
• Shortcut: r

Now typing “r generalized linear model” in the address bar will bring you all information you need about this very nice statistical framework.

You can even expand your bookmark to search R manual and web pages as well as R mailing list. Just restrict th search to https://stat.ethz.ch/ instead of https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/ (The location field hence becomes http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fstat.ethz.ch%2F).

I use those custom search bookmarks all the time (g for Google, w for Wikipedia, d for Dictionary.com… and even m for Marmiton.org when I am in the mood to cook) and I use the R related one more and more these days.