I must admit that when it comes to regexes I am very much an newbie.

/me too, that's why I generally try not to be too smart with them. Of course sometimes sharpening one's own skills is not too bad and a look at the documentation is well worth.

With regard to getting generic urls, I wanted specifically the link urls's that a Google search generates, which tend to be long hairballs, which I didn't know how to handle well directly.

Well, google urls can be as simple as http://www.google.com/search?q=cool+perl+stuff. In fact, notwithstanding FF's cool search box available at a cheap keybinding, I often find myself composing them manually. In that case two parameters that happen to be useful for me are num and filter as in num=100&filter=0. Of course, this has nothing to do with Perl...