The Flessenlikker of Search Engines

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.

2 Replies to “The Flessenlikker of Search Engines”

  1. Processing (.org) has the same problem.  There’s no excuse for choosing a language name without searchability in this day and age.  :)

  2. 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.

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