Quote:
Originally Posted by Someone
For some reason Google doesn't support regular expressions
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Due to the way search indexes are stored, using regular expressions to search would require orders of magnitude more processing for each search performed. A typical inverted index links from a search term directly to all the results containing it, whereas a regexp search term would actually need to be tested against each potential result separately. I don't know of ways to make that scale up to google size. And they don't have much incentive to work on that problem, since hardly anybody knows what the heck a regexp is.
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