There's an R-specific search engine called Rseek: http://www.rseek.org/

It's still not perfect, because if you don't know the right keyword for a concept you might not get what you're looking for. But it's pretty good.

When looking for an R package that does something specific, I usually go to the R package list [1] and search for what I am looking for ("SQL" if I want an SQL connector or "sparse" if I want something with sparse matrix). I generally end up finding a package that does what I need.

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by...

It's not just you. This was a huge problem for me at first. When you're googling search "R cran" + your query

You'll get way better results