Is there any search engine that supports regular expressions?

Question

Google and Bing do not support regular expressions while searching.

Is there any search engine that does support regular expressions?

Answer 1

Google and Bing does not actually support regex.

The internet is big. There are a lot of websites out there that take up petabytes of space. Doing a regex support across all of them is pretty much impossible given the current state of computing.

I found this gem on Ask Metafilter:

The only possible way to make keyword searching efficient over hundreds of terabytes (or whatever their index is up to these days) is to precompute an index of words.

In fact a full regex engine is turing-complete, and you can write arbitrary regexps that will gobble up near infinite amounts of CPU time and memory. For all these reasons it would be technical insanity for them to offer regex searching to the general public.

Sorry, but I highly doubt there is a search engine that supports regex.

Answer 2

Google Code Search allows you to use regular expressions.