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Search Patterns

James Joseph Balamuta

2024-02-03

Introduction

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.

Usage

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")

Search Operators

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.

General Search Tips

To improve your R-related search query, it has been suggested to use:

Suggestions here were pooled from discussion on rOpenSci’s slack with Steph Locke and Robert Mitchell.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.