Francis Smart offers five excellent reasons to use R, in a well-researched post ideal for sharing with anyone thinking about making the switch to R. (You might also share this YouTube video for a quick 90-second introduction to R.)
The post also includes a novel analysis of interest in R, as tracked by Google Trends. Given its single-letter name, comparitive metrics for R can be tricky to come by, but Google Trends lets you focus on interest in R the programming language (and not, say, the R Kelly album), and compare it to SAS the statistical software (not the airline) and other similar products. Google Trends also includes forecasts, and shows that not only does interest in R eclipse all others in Google searches, it's set to continue to grow:
(That's a static screenshot -- click to see an updated Google Trends analysis.)
Econometrics by Simulation: Why use R? Five reasons
I love R, but it's top search term is "\r" which is probably related the the website "reddit" and accounts for almost 100% of the search volume.
Is Google able to differentiate between "\r" searches looking for "reddit" vs "\r" searches looking for "R"?
Posted by: Zach | March 31, 2014 at 08:34
@Zach, this is a semantic search using Google Trends, so it's not just counting searches including the letter "R". It includes only searches related to "R programming language" (but not all such searches -- Google's classification algos aren't perfect.)
It's surprising actually to see SAS so low; the only semantic search Google offers is "SAS Institute / Software Company" which may be missing some searches about SAS the software. Here's a comparison though between ALL searches including the *word* SAS (even if they were about the airline or the military -- so an overestimate), and ONLY searches about R the programming language (likely an underestimate).
Posted by: David Smith | March 31, 2014 at 16:15
One thing is sure: google does not differentiate for people in Italy (Romania, Moldavia, Portugal/Brasil) looking for Statistica which means statistics in the languages spoken in those countried. Most of the searches there are about that use of the term.
And the reason why the country with the highest volume for SAS is Italy is that sas in Italy is a limited company, nothing to do with the SAS institute - so the volumes are not correct.
Just saying, R might be even bigger, but these numbers are not completely reliable...
Posted by: Ilaria | April 01, 2014 at 01:44