in reply to alternation in regexes: to use or to avoid?
It's not clear to me what you are trying to achieve with your regex.
The simple grouping that look like this
aol\s*\w+|aachen\s*\w+|aaliyah\s*\w+|.....runs quickly, it's only the one with lots of capture groups that is slow. i.e
(aol)\s*\w+|(aachen)\s*\w+|(aaliyah)\s*\w+|....So maybe there's just a better way to get the result you want, if you'd care to explain what that is?
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