The searcher provides a search interface to look up terms on popular websites such as ‘Google’, ‘Bing’, ‘DuckDuckGo’, ‘StackOverflow’, ‘GitHub’, and ‘BitBucket’. Upon calling a searcher functions, a browser window will open with the search results for the query.

The idea for searcher began as a project to automatically search errors and warnings that occurred while working with R after a conversation among Dirk Eddelbuettel, Barry Rowlingson, and myself. However, there was no search interface that allowed querying directly from R outside of the built-in utils::RSiteSearch(), which only queries http://search.r-project.org/, and the sos package, which queries an off-site user premade database. Both of these options were focused solely on querying R documentation made available by packages. Given the nature of errors generally being undocumented, neither of these approaches could be used. Thus, searcher was unintentionally born to provide a means for errorist, which contains a robust way to automatically searching errors and warnings.

searcher news file entry for version 0.0.2 (2018-01-14)

searcher 0.0.2

Features

• Added search portal functions
  • search_site(): Looks up search portal and then searches with it.
  • search_google(): Searches with Google
  • search_bing(): Searches with Bing
  • search_duckduckgo() or search_ddg(): Searches with DuckDuckGo
  • search_github() or search_gh(): Searches issues on GitHub
  • search_bitbucket() or search_bb(): Searches issues on BitBucket
  • search_stackoverflow() or search_so(): Searches questions on StackOverflow
• Add function generator searcher() to create function objects that can be used as error handlers in option(error = ) and task call-backs.

UX

• Created a browse_url() that checks to see if it is in interactive mode before trying to open a web browser 0.5 seconds after call.

Special Thanks

• Dirk Eddelbuettel for starting the discussion on XKCD Comic 1185: Ineffective Sorts.
• Barry Rowlingson for remarks about functionality.