To the (regexpmobile|globmobile) Robin!

September 14, 2009 7:22 PM

Can I use shell style globs or something like regexp to search for online content?

I want to be able to search for '*mobile' or '.*mobile$' or something similar and get something like "bookmobile, popemobile, spacemobile, pimpmobile, weinermobile ..." as a result.

I am looking for a general way to search for things like this based on internet (particularly web) usage, not just a list of compound words that end in mobile.

posted by idiopath to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Google Code Search supports regex search, but of course its search domain is limited to online source code.
posted by jedicus at 7:30 PM on September 14

Well, you can do this.¹
posted by niles at 7:59 PM on September 14

niles: "you can do this"

That doesn't search for compound words (I am not sure but it may or may not be matching hyphenated forms). That was exactly the search and the poor results that led to putting up this post.
posted by idiopath at 8:03 PM on September 14

Google Sets sort of does this, though it's a bit limited.
posted by sfenders at 4:15 AM on September 15

Well that does what I wanted, but not in the way I wanted. I got my results though, thanks.
posted by idiopath at 5:36 AM on September 15