Email Netiquette

A short piece of web-scrapping I sent as a reminder to my colleague.

	count.google.hits <- function(query) {
	# call Google Search and extract the number of hits
	url <- paste('http://www.google.com/search?q=', query, sep="")
	tmp <- readLines(url, warn=FALSE)
	writeLines(tmp, "c:\\temp\\pokus.html")
	pattern <- ".*<div id=resultStats>[A-Za-z ]*([0-9 ,]*) results<nobr> \\([0-9.]* seconds\\).*"
	count.line <- grep(pattern,tmp)[1]
	hits <- sub(pattern, "\\1", tmp[[count.line]])
	hits.as.number <- as.numeric(gsub(",","",hits))
	return(hits.as.number)
	}
	hours <- seq(from=24, to=6*24, by=24)
	# hours to be googled
	results <- rep(0, length(hours))
	names(results) <- as.character(hours)
	for (X in hours) {
	query <- paste('netiquette', 'recommends', 'to', 'respond', 'to', 'email',
	'within', paste('"',X,'+hours"', sep=""),sep="+")
	results[X/24] <- count.google.hits(query)
	}
	barplot(results,
	main="Netiquette recommends to respond to email within X hours",
	ylab="Number of hits in Google Search",
	xlab="X",
	col=rainbow(6)
	)

view raw netiquette.r hosted with ❤ by GitHub

If you run it the result should be something like...

Datatata!