Regex Searching the WWW

Polyglot has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

A friend of mine recently wanted to do a search for every possible usage of the word "academic," as in "academic acceptance", "academic administration", "academic dean", etc. Does anyone here know of a good way to use regex on the WWW to acquire such a list, or simply to search online with a regex tool for any purpose? A good CPAN module, perhaps?

Blessings,

~Polyglot~

Comment on Regex Searching the WWW

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Re: Regex Searching the WWW by davorg (Chancellor) on Jun 24, 2009 at 11:10 UTC
Net::Google perhaps? I've never used it, but it seems an obvious first step. -- See the Copyright notice on my home node. Perl training courses	[reply]
Re^2: Regex Searching the WWW by Polyglot (Chaplain) on Jun 24, 2009 at 11:41 UTC
Google, as programmers may be aware, does have a Regex search--but it is limited to programming code. They have not, so far as I am aware, made available any other regex searching of internet content in general. For what my friend was wanting, I think there were about two mentions of "academic" in someone's code somewhere. Obviously, that wasn't quite the answer he wanted. Blessings, ~Polyglot~	[reply]
Re: Regex Searching the WWW by apl (Monsignor) on Jun 24, 2009 at 11:55 UTC
Is there a resaon you need to do this programmatically, as opposed to simply using Google?	[reply]
Re^2: Regex Searching the WWW by Polyglot (Chaplain) on Jun 24, 2009 at 12:38 UTC
Google provides oodles of hits, but does not feed back a nice list, which is what I would want in this instance. I suppose if I were willing to click on every link provided by google, and then copy and paste the terms I was looking for into my own list, perhaps a few days from now I might have something close to complete. But that's a few days' work, and I'm lazy. That's why I want to use a little regex to make life easier. Blessings, ~Polyglot~	[reply]
Re: Regex Searching the WWW by planetscape (Chancellor) on Jun 25, 2009 at 00:49 UTC
If you had a sufficient corpus of English (American? ;-)) texts, you could use something like Ted Pedersen's Ngram Statistics Package to find word bigrams (see also: Corpus linguistics). One place to start might be the UCL Survey of English Usage. HTH, planetscape	[reply]
Re: Regex Searching the WWW by aixtal (Sexton) on Jun 24, 2009 at 19:16 UTC
Check www.exalead.com. They do have a regexp search in the advanced search form.	[reply]