> I think you need to approach it more like grep than google. It's a forgotten art A search engine that accepted regex as the search parameter would be amazing

> I think you need to approach it more like grep than google. It's a forgotten art A search engine that accepted regex as the search parameter would be amazing. I actually used this method as a field filter for a bunch of simple internal tools to search for info. Originally people were asking for individual search capabilities, but I didn't want it to become a giant project with me as the implementor of everyone's unique search capability feature request - so I just gave them regex, encoded inputs into the URL query string so they can save searches - gave em a bunch of examples to get going and now people are slowly learning regex and coming up with their own "new features" :P But this made sense because it's a relatively small amount of data, so small that it's searched in the front end which is why it's more of a filter... I don't think pure regex would scale when used as a query on a massive DB, it would need some kind of hierachy still to only bother parsing a subset of relevant text... unless there is some clever functional regex caching algorithm that can be used.