The searcher package (CRAN, GitHub) provides a search interface to look up terms on popular websites such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia, Rseek, Twitter, StackOverflow, RStudio Community, GitHub, and BitBucket. Upon calling a search_*() function, a browser window will open with the search results for the query.
searcher usageAfter a year of dormacy, the searcher package is back with a new update! In this update, we’ve added two requested searcher portals: Ecosia and Rseek. The Rseek portal was contributed by Alex Rossell Hayes, which made him the first external contributor for the project!
Outside of that, we worked on improving deployment and cleaning up spurious R checks due to search engine URLs changing. I highly recommend using Jim Hester’s {urlcheck} package to avoid repeated R CMD checks on Comprehensive R Archival Networks (CRAN)’s win-builder service.
For more details about the changes, please see the full NEWS entry below.
searcher news file entry for version 0.0.6 (2021-07-24)
Features
- Added search portals:
search_ecosia(): Searches on Ecosia. (#31, #32)search_rseek(): Searches on rseek. (#32, thanks @rossellhayes!)
Bug Fixes
- Modified URLs to search engines to pass CRAN checks.
- Removed documentation URLs to Ecosia search engine as they return
404: Not Found.
Deployment
- Updated GitHub Actions for R workflows (#34).
- Added pkgdown website (#34).