Adding a CRAN Search Engine to Chrome

Riffing off of the previous post, here’s a way to quickly search CRAN (the @RStudio flavor) from the Chrome search bar.

• Paste chrome://settings/searchEngines into your location bar and hit return/enter
• Scroll down until the input boxes show, enabling you to add a search engine
• For “Add a new search engine” put “CRAN”
• For “Keyword” put “R”, “rstats” or “CRAN”, but “R” is super easy to type, though it may not be optimal for you :-)
• For “URL with %s in place of query” put the following:

https://www.google.com/search?as_q=%s&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=cran.rstudio.com&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&as_rights=&gws_rd=ssl

(you may be able to trim that URL a bit, if desired)

Save that and then in the Chrome location bar hit R then [TAB] and you’ll be sending the query to a custom Google search that only looks on CRAN (specifically the @RStudio CRAN mirror).