Supercharge your #rstats web searching in Google Chrome with Site Search Shortcuts
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Introduction
Have you ever typed Amazon
into the Google Chrome address bar and seen the address bar indicate that it’s now searching the Amazon site? It turns out this is a feature in Google Chrome called site search shortcuts.
We can see what default shortcuts Chrome provides by in the Chrome address bar going to chrome://settings/searchEngines
and scrolling to the Site Search section.
From here we can see that we can define our own shortcuts, so let’s define some helpful ones related to R and statistics.1
Helpful Google Chrome site search shortcuts for R and statistics
METACRAN provides several amazingly useful services around CRAN.
- A shortcut for searching the METACRAN CRAN mirror on GitHub
Name: CRAN mirror on GitHub
Shortcut: @cran
URL with %s in place of query:
https://github.com/search?q=user%3Acran%20%s&ref=opensearch&type=code
On the Chrome settings page click add and enter the information. To use this simply type @cran
into the address bar
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and then type your search term
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Here are some other shortcuts.
- A shortcut for searching for a package description on METACRAN
Name: METACRAN
Shortcut: @metacran
URL with %s in place of query:
https://r-pkg.org/search.html/?q=%s
- A shortcut for searching using Rseek
Name: Rseek
Shortcut: @rseek
URL with %s in place of query:
https://rseek.org/?q=%s
- A shortcut for searching R-universe
Name: R-universe
Shortcut: @runi
URL with %s in place of query:
https://r-universe.dev/search/?q=%s
- A shortcut for searching the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Statistics
Name: Oxford Dictionary of Statistics
Shortcut: @stats
URL with %s in place of query:
https://www.oxfordreference.com/search?source=%2F10.1093%2Facref%2F9780199679188.001.0001%2Facref-9780199679188&q=%s
And we could define many more.
Summary
In summary we have defined several Google Chrome site search shortcuts related to R and statistics.