3 ms·

http://duckduckgo.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/ might help. I know it utilizes the bang syntax.

• gnosis 15y ago
  Thanks, but that's really not the same at all. Those are just predefined custom searches, a feature built in to Opera (my browser of choice), and probably other browsers as well. Unfortunately, custom searches are still limited to using whatever syntax the search engines they query use, so if that search engine does not support regexes, using a custom search (or "bang search") won't help. They can still be a valuable search tool, but not what I'm looking for.
  • pmjordan 15y ago
    I suspect it's not that easy to graft them onto existing search engines efficiently. I don't know what sort of data structure search engines usually use, but in order to support regexes efficiently they would almost certainly have to be a prefix tree of some sort.
    • gnosis 15y ago
      http://www.google.com/codesearch http://www.google.com/codesearch allows them, so it is doable. It may not be efficient for larger datasets and large numbers of users, but that need not be a problem for the search engine owners, as they could just take their sweet time in returning results.
      • pmjordan 15y ago
        It still costs them CPU/IO time and thus represents a possible DoS vector.