"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?
http://rweb.stat.umn.edu/R/doc/html/search/SearchEngine.html
www.rseek.org
www.dangoldstein.com/search_r.html
You could always search for "R stats", considering R is a statistical program.
Edit: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=R+stats&btnG=Google+Search
The first page shows plenty of relevant results.
google for "r language" (with the quotes) and then your search terms.
Adding "site:r-project.org" will help narrow down the results to only things on the official project web site. YMMV.
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?
Search for "S-PLUS" instead. R and S-PLUS are siblings, but the latter is easier to search for.
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.
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.
To find questions/answers on Stack Overflow, I always; go to Tags, type R, find the R tag and click on it.
Jeff mentioned a better way to search for the R Tag on the podcast, but I've since deleted it. :-(
Discussion aside, Stack Overflow (or one of the sister sites) would be a great resource for R users. The very high volume R-help email list could be reduced by sending Noobies like myself to specific places here. One confounding issue is that while the questions are mostly about the R language, they are often about the proper statistical test or algorithm for the problem.
RWFarley
You can use this site:
http://www.dangoldstein.com/search_r.html, "Search the R Statistical Language".
Has "R Multi-site search powered by Google" and "R Multi- site search powered by Rollyo".
Note that it requires JavaScript to work (can be restricted to www.dangoldstein.com and google.com if your browser setup allows it - e.g. using NoScript in Firefox).
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:
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.
for your original question, i.e. how to search in google: one of my previous colleagues suggested to use keyword "r-help" instead of "r" together with your question when searching in google. It searches in the mailing list for answers. That always works for me.