I've also tried to find a search engine that supports regex and have come up empty. I hope somebody on this thread pleasantly surprises me, but I now doubt one

I've also tried to find a search engine that supports regex and have come up empty. I hope somebody on this thread pleasantly surprises me, but I now doubt one exists. Since parsing regular expressions is so slow compared with performing an indexed search, it's difficult to think of a way to make that scale for a dataset as large as the public web. There's also the problem of having to protect against regex denial of service attacks: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS I've been able to (very partially) make up for the lack of regex support by taking advantage of Google's operators and wildcards: http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html Some examples: "solar|lunar eclipse 1700..1800" "William * Clinton" Columbus -Ohio -Georgia -Christopher This is hardly a replacement for regex, but it's the best I've been able to come up with.