grep and egrep).
As a result, Unix geeks are very comfortable with them, and since Unix
geeks write most of the web indexing services, they think that
regular expressions make a good query language.
Here's the very least you need to know about regular expressions to be able to use them for web searching; you could learn lots more.
.*
.* in a query, it matches any number of
characters, zero or more in fact. So:
.*communication
would match communication and telecommunication,
among others. Since right truncation is implicit, it would also match
telecommunications (.*communication.* would be
redundant).
You can use .* in the middle of a query as well.
.
. by itself matches any single character.
|
|) is a Boolean OR operator; for
example, you could form a search for communications or networking with
a query like:
.*communication|network