Regex Searching the WWW

[Polyglot]

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~

[davorg]

Net::Google perhaps? I've never used it, but it seems an obvious first step.

[Polyglot]

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~

[apl]

Is there a resaon you need to do this programmatically, as opposed to simply using Google?

[Polyglot]

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~

[planetscape]

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.

[aixtal]

Check www.exalead.com. They do have a regexp search in the advanced search form.