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"The Google" is very helpful... unless your language is called "R," in which case it spits out tons of irrelevant stuff.
Anyone have any search engine tricks for "R"? There are some specialized websites, like those below, but how can you tell Google you mean "R" the language? If I'm searching for something specific, I'll use an R-specific term, like "cbind." Are there other such tricks?
http://rseek.org is a great search engine for R manuals, mailing lists, and various websites. It's a Google syndicated search app with specialized UI. I always use it.
An update, several years later
All the links you need are right here:
https://stackoverflow.com/tags/r/info
This was discussed on the R-Help mailing list recently.
Some things mentioned there that haven't been covered here are:
Using the RSiteSearch function, and the package of the same name.
Using R-specific search engines. You mentioned RSeek and RSearch. You can also search the R mail archive, the help wiki, the task views, RForge, and Bioconductor among other places.
Most of the time I find googling for R plus my searching term works fine. When it doesn't, I'll try using "R project", or adding CRAN, statistic or language to the search.
Is there a particular topic that you're having problems searching for?
Search for "S-PLUS" instead. R and S-PLUS are siblings, but the latter is easier to search for.
To find questions/answers on Stack Overflow, I always; go to Tags, type R, find the R tag and click on it.
Jeff mentioned a better way to search for the R Tag on the podcast, but I've since deleted it. :-(
Discussion aside, Stack Overflow (or one of the sister sites) would be a great resource for R users. The very high volume R-help email list could be reduced by sending Noobies like myself to specific places here. One confounding issue is that while the questions are mostly about the R language, they are often about the proper statistical test or algorithm for the problem.
RWFarley
You could always search for "R stats", considering R is a statistical program.
Edit: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=R+stats&btnG=Google+Search
The first page shows plenty of relevant results.
Adding "site:r-project.org" will help narrow down the results to only things on the official project web site. YMMV.
How about "R statistical" or "R package"?
Also, restrict your search to the domain cran.r-project.org. For example, searching for how to use ifelse in R:
ifelse site:cran.r-project.org