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

and then type your search term

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.