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> Even more interesting than a simple full-text search would be a regular-expression full-text search of the internet

It would seem to me that indexing data in such a way as to support arbitrary regex would be difficult. Anybody know of an existing system?

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Yes, Google code search: http://codesearch.google.com

It's my understanding that the amount of code is so small that they just have it all in ram (and maybe less accessed data goes to disk) and do a distributed grep.

Right, that's more or less what all the approaches I've seen use. It's not indexing in the sense of full-text indexing for fast retrieval, all of the data is more or less greped over. It's basically just a full-text search, not an index.

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