Internet search needs regular expressions

[kirinn]

So I'm looking for something in the format "foo-bar", with those exact characters including the dash. I'm pretty sure the next word contains a certain character too, let's say 'z'. I'm completely failing this search

Comments

[steuard]

I fear it's a lost cause because the master index ignores punctuation. (Or at least, that's my impression. I'm guessing that word boundaries are something that Google has optimized the heck out of. I'm pretty sure I've read before that any punctuation within a query ends up acting to join the two words as if they were in quotes.)

Unless that punctuation is "_", which apparently counts as a letter. (A number of my old Usenet posts are hard to search in because I used to use faux-underlining for emphasis.) I think this is inherited from Perl or somesuch.