How to search the R-sig-finance archives

A not unusual part of a response on the R-sig-finance mailing list is:

“Search the list archives.”

In principle that makes sense.  In practice it might not be clear what to do.  Now it should be.

The list

The R-sig-finance mailing list deals with the intersection of questions about the R language and finance.  It can be of interest to finance people who don’t use R.

You can subscribe via https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/R-SIG-Finance/

You need to be subscribed in order to post to the list.

You can see the archives of the list at https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-finance/ but I doubt that is an effective route to searching the archives.

Search method J

As in Josh.

  • Go to Rseek
  • Put in your search term
  • select “Support Lists” (near top right)

The search we want to do (of course) is for “Lao Tzu”.  The method works wonderfully for this.

Search method B

As in Brian.

  • Use the search engine of your choice
  • Start with the list name, then your target search

For example, search:

r-sig-finance Lao Tzu

The order can matter, and Brian asserts that putting the list name first gives better results.

Search method D

As in Dirk.

Hey, I have it all memorized, why would I need to search?

Questions

What other strategies are there for searching the archives?

Epilogue

I’ve looked under chairs
I’ve looked under tables
I’ve tried to find the key
To fifty million fables

from “The Seeker” by Pete Townshend

This entry was posted in Quant finance, R language and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to How to search the R-sig-finance archives

  1. Vincent says:

    Method B can be improved by restricting the search to a given website, e.g., “site:stat.ethz.ch r-sig-finance Lao Tzu”. The actual syntax may depend on the search engine used.

  2. Misinformation 🙂 I actually use a ‘modified Brian and Vincent method’, most often simply something like ‘gmane r-sig-finance some term’ as I like the gmane.org presentation (esp. ‘threaded’) better than the default mailman archives from the list software. And I agree with Vincent that the ‘site:’ operator can help too.

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