Is there a way to search in Google using Regular Expressions (regex)?

Question

It would be very useful if Google provided a regex search.

Is there a way to do this?

(OBS.: Not talking about false-regex like site: or filetype: or AND or OR or "Text", I would like search with regex .+[]^).

For example, is there an app or a site or a Google tool to search things like *.stackexchange?

Answer 1

This feature is not available in classic Google Search and it's not in Google's roadmap. You can learn more about this topic watching the Google video Will Google implement the ability to search with regular expressions?

However, there's one exception. Google Code Search supports regular expressions. Of course, the search target for this topic search engine is reduced to source code only.

It is worth to mention that some Google search keywords can partially replace regular expressions. For example, if you want to search any two-word variation of "search TERM", you can use the wildcard operator.

search *

will find results for search and any other (one) word. I often use it to check basic English grammar rules or synonyms (e.g., "as easy as *").

Answer 2

SymbolHound has an open source code repository search, similar to the now-discontinued Google Code Search option, in addition to a symbol-inclusive web search that indexes programming-related sites such as Stackoverflow.

Answer 3

For example, is there a app or a site

Blekko does a Web Grep on a daily basis:

Everyday, we will run 2 map jobs against our crawl of 4 billion pages. These will be greps for strings, patterns, regex expressions that blekko users submit to us and decide are cool. Got a grep you want to run? Submit it here. If enough people agree with you that this grep is interesting (by voting it up), we’ll run it. And we’ll post the results here. We make the top 500 results for every grep available for free to anyone who wants it.

While it's not exactly what you want, it's the closest that comes to it.

Answer 4

No, unfortunately not :(. In theory you could make your own search engine and do it, but that would be pretty hard.