nobody ever needs this feature!

I do!

I wrote a (heuristic-driven) Perlish syntax parser and transformer in Emacs Lisp, and though Perl as a language is incomparably friendlier than Lisps, I would not be even able of thinking about rewriting this tool in Perl:

--- Ilya Zakharevich, published on Perl.com 09.2000

also worth a look: Text Processing: Elisp vs Perl

For all these features you need a reliable possibility to search backwards from the last match position, that's what this thread is about.

Otherwise feel free to show me alternatives...