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