[R] Proposal for New R List: Criticism? Comments?

[Jim Lemon]

The number of help requests that could be answered by either:

1) A full text search of package INDEX files

or

2) A full text search of package documentation files

is certainly large. Professor Baron's search engine does this very well. Some 
time ago, I wrote a Tck-Tk program to perform this sort of search, so that I 
could enter any word and get a list of all files in the R documentation that 
contained that word. In general, it is about as comprehensive as the UPenn 
search engine. However, neither of these are on the CRAN site. It does not 
seem difficult to program such a search on CRAN, so that someone seeking a 
package dealing with, say, "goodness of fit" could enter it and have an HTML 
page served with a list of links to documentation files that contain that 
phrase. A lot easier than working one's way through the 350+ packages listed 
or attempting to divine what each package contains from their often whimsical 
names.

Yes, I would be happy to have a try.

Jim