When trying to solve a problem, part of the process is to research what attempts have been made by others. The most common form of research is to query a search portal. One downside to this approach is that each search portal has its own set of operators or query phrasing that will yield relevant content. As a result, those that have domain knowledge are able to format the search query in a way that is better. Still many queries are not constrained enough to the programming language being used. The goal of searcher is to attempt to address both needs by providing a convenient pre-specified search interface that tailors the results to R.
To begin using searcher, first install the package from CRAN.
# Install the searcher package if not already installed
install.packages("searcher")Once installed, searching with searcher is done by using one or more of the search_*() functions. To access these functions, either use a namespace function call of searcher::search_*() or load the searcher package and, then, call the function.
# Loads the searcher package
library("searcher")
# Searches using Google for `tips`
search_google("tips")Within the searcher package, each search_*() function has the parameter of rlang = TRUE. By default, this enforces a search that guarantees R-specific results. If rlang = FALSE, then the results are generalized.
"r programming" to the end of the query to constrain the results to be R-specific."r programming" was selected because it performed best when compared to "rlang", "rstats", and "r language" on Google Trends.<query> + [r]<query> + #rstats<query><query><query> language:r type:issue<query> lang:rTo improve your R-related search query, it has been suggested to use:
"r how to do <x>"
"r how to remove legends in ggplot""<package name> <problem>"
"ggplot2 fix x-axis labels."r and instead focusing on the package name at the start of the query."r <package-name> <problem> <year> site:<specific-site>
"r ggplot2 center graph title 2018 site:stackoverflow.comSuggestions here were pooled from discussion on rOpenSci’s slack with Steph Locke and Robert Mitchell.