Remember in July we saw Google testing adding regular expressions (regex) filters to some of the Search Console performance report. It then went away quickly. Well, Google's John Mueller was asked about that and if they will be coming back to Search Console.
John was asked "do you have a plan to add regexp filter into GSC performance report?" John responded on Twitter "Yes, we have a plan. Unfortunately I can't share it with you."
Here are those tweets:
Yes, we have a plan. Unfortunately I can't share it with you. I don't know if that's helpful, but it is what it is :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 3, 2020
Just to remind you, Google added the regex information to the Search Console documentation and then pulled it. But it did say "if you choose the Custom (regex) filter, you can filter by a regular expression (a wildcard match) for the selected item. You can use regular expression filters for page URLs and user queries. The RE2 syntax is used."
- The default matching is "partial match", which means that your regular expression can match anywhere in the target string unless you use ^ or $ to require matching from the start or end of the string, respectively.
- Default matching is case-sensitive. You can specify "(?i)" at the beginning of your regular expression string for case-insensitive matches. Example: (?i)https
- Invalid regular expression syntax will return no matches.
- Regular expression matching is tricky; try out your expression on a live testing tool, or read the full RE2 syntax guide
This would be fun if Google added this support.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
