I am aware of Google Dorks that use advanced operators to search for keywords on Web, and Google Dorks is not Regex by anyhow.
Out of curiosity I tried putting wildcard characters in URLs mostly for images on various sites that didn't worked out. Most of them showed various HTTP Error Codes, with exception of 2-3 that redirected to some other page within the website.
Some examples that didn't worked :
- Searching for PDFs. Got
404 : Page Not Found
- Searching for Images. Got
500 : Internal Server Error
- Searching for all HTML pages on Website. Simply Error page
- Youtube converts characters to Safe Hexadecimal characters.
An example that worked (No Idea how) :
See the Question Tagged
section on the right of page to see all searches for the word lin*
I apologize If question has too much details, but I find it appropriate giving some examples. So, here I conclude my question :
Can Regular Expressions be used in any way in URLs while browsing ?
If so what are rules or methods of using them ?
Also, Uses Section under Wikipedia page for Regular Expressions quote this :
While regexes would be useful on Internet search engines, processing them across the entire database could consume excessive computer resources depending on the complexity and design of the regex. Although in many cases system administrators can run regex-based queries internally, most search engines do not offer regex support to the public. Notable exceptions: Google Code Search, Exalead. Google Code Search has been shut down as of January 2012.[39] It used a trigram index to speed queries.[40]
So, Is it like we can do Regex Search on Search Engines but not on Webpages ?