Given it’s single letter name — and a common letter both in general and in statistics where it often represents correlation — searching for documentation on R on the web is difficult enough that folks have put together a custom search engine, RSeek. I’ve been doing quite a bit of R in the last year and can testify that RSeek is indispensable.
That said, using a custom search engine seems like a funny way of solving an problem that could be easily avoided. RSeek is sort of like the flessenlikker of search engines.
Processing (.org) has the same problem. There’s no excuse for choosing a language name without searchability in this day and age. :)
Thanks for the useful link, although I’m not sure this is a silver bullet.
Contrast these queries:
“numerical” “derivative” in Rseek
“R” “numerical” “derivative” in Google
help.search(“derivative”) in R
R and Google both yield numericDeriv; Rseek’s results are a bit more eclectic.