We need search bars which support regex.
Everywhere.

Sounds like you need the grep command

regex search on google, insane

I'd love to see it, but the way websites are indexed by most search engines would make it an entirely new piece of technology, because right now using a regex against petabytes of data would be slow and expensive.

Making a regex-ready index is a fascinating thought though.

@bigOHNOtation I mean in general, sure for particular problems I try to find my way through with grep or some programming, but having regex directly implemented in browsers or file explorer would sometimes really be helpful.

no. just... no.
regex is inefficient for large datasets, and some regex libs intruduce security issues.

I'm not a regex guy but...
sounds cool.

and regex filter settings on all pages

Your asking a lot of the average Facebook user to understand exactly what a regular expression is ... Let alone the difference between . ? and +

@ManBunMike why not advanced settings without the urge to use them? average joe does not necessarily use taskmanager or settings on a daily basis too. but it is nice to have.

If you pay for the servers

if you mean client side in the web, there is this
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/...

if you mean server side, no, it's too expensive or too fragile.

@bahua yes, although some regex implementations can be pretty damn fast. have a look at ripgrep, for example.

@erroronline1i don't disagree, but these are business people, not engineering l, that you'd have to wrestle that idea through.

@git-gud But search engines deal with massive search sapces that really only work because they have clever ways of hashing and caching it. An arbitrary regex would basically require a deep search

User search: . *
Search engine: I found <numberYetToBeNamed> results

The first page is just every character of the first few words of the first url.

The search engine slogan should be "please use regex responsibly"

Also, good luck preventing ReDOS attacks.

https://owasp.org/index.php/...

@cmarshall10450 never heard of this, pretty cool!

@git-gud

Sure, but even so, an indexing system would still be necessary. Totally doable, but it just isn't done by anyone yet.

Well I guess you guys have a fair point, for servers/services it's not really doable.

But! I still think, for client side applications such as a web browser, a file explorer, etc there should be an additionally selectable box to toggle regex search mode.

I mean, I have used regex search in sublime text A LOT. Like literally everytime.

Sure, you have the problem of reDOS (attacks?) mistakes, they will only happen locally, but sublime text has this problem, too, and I really don't see it as a problem if you are careful.

@git-gud still not close to as fast as an inverted index or similar technology. You can't grep at the scale of Google search

you madman!