Chapter 3 Finding Help

In data science and computer-related work in general, it is common to ask for help multiple times per day. While sometimes we ask our colleagues for help in-person, most of the time we search the web.

Throughout the coursework it may surprise you just how frequently other people have run into the same problem or had the exact same question you have. Often, there is an answer that was publicly shared previously on the Internet that can help answer the very question you’re asking. There are a number of websites and discussion boards where people frequently ask and answer questions. By knowing how to effectively search the web, you can easily find these answers.

3.0.1 Searching the Internet

You’ve been working on the Internet through this coursework so far on the Chrome Browser? Within every Internet browser, you have access to web search engines. These are designed to find the most relevant answers to our question. The most common web search engine is Google. In fact, Google started as a web search engine before it developed any of the other many products it offers today. We can access Google by typing www.google.com in the search bar at the top of the Chrome browser. This will bring you to the Google homepage, where you will see a simple text box and a button called Google search.

Google search

On the search box, as you start typing your question you will see suggestions based on what you have written so far. This is called Google auto-complete. Here is an example where Google suggests a few common searches that start with “how to find help in”.

Google auto-complete

The auto-complete feature can be useful because it helps us refine our search query which will lead to more relevant results and answers. Throughout this course work, we’ll be using the R programming language to complete data analyses. Thus, you will often be searching for help related to the R programming language. So, in this example, let’s select “how to find help in r” and then click on the Google search button, we will get a list of websites that are most related to our question as shown below.

Google search results

Google highlights some of our key terms from our search in the search results list. For example, the word help is bolded twice on the first link title “R: Getting Help with R”.

Each search result includes a short title, the web link, a short extract from the website, and some of our search terms (words) highlighted. Using this information we have to decide if our search was specific enough. For example, we could have searched “how to get help”. Google search would have had no way of knowing that we had an R question specifically. Alternatively, searching “how to get help for all the questions I’ve ever had or may have in the R programming language today or tomorrow” is also not ideal. Devising a search with the fewest words that help accurately answer your questions is the goal!

We will cover different ways of finding help. Throughout this coursework, you’ll likely learn that part of being a data scientist means being good at Googling. Effectively searching the web is an important skill to have.

3.0.2 Search Guidelines

The best way to get a response to your question is to be able to boil it down to relatively few words. Less is usually better…it’s also faster to type too! So, when you’re Googling things, keep a few things in mind:

Use the fewest words possible - full sentences and correct grammar are not necessary when searching google
Be Specific - include words that are important to your specific search
Know specific websites where you can get help - while Google is generally a great place to start, sometimes it can be helpful to know specific websites where you can get help. StackOverflow, Basecamp, and the RStudio Community will likely be helpful places as you learn to program in R. These resources will be covered in detail in a future course; however, it’s good at this point to know they exist

3.1 Using AI ChatBots

Sometimes it can be very useful to use AI chatbots to help you find summarized information. Some examples of how you might use something like ChatGPT:

Ask ChatGPT “Explain to me what this code is doing?” and paste into the chat some code you are confused about.
Ask ChatGPT “This piece of code is throwing an error, can you explain to me what might be causing this error?”
Ask ChatGPT “Can you explain to me what this error means?”
Ask ChatGPT “I want to write R code that does ______” and tell it what you’d like to do. It will provide you with code but the code may not work so you will need to run it and figure out how to make it work for yourself.
Ask ChatGPT anything you might ask a fellow student! It will have lots of information, but remember that you will need to check for yourself whether the information is accurate!