This program lets you retrieve any two-word combinations that you want to find from among the corpora that are currently available on the BLC KWIC Concordancer site. If you want to find all the instances of the as ... as construction with three or less intervening words in between the two strings, for instance, enter as follows and choose a search corpus before clicking SUBMIT:
 

Word 1:	as
No. of intervening words:	3 or less
Word 1:	as
Corpus:	01. Business Letter Corpus (BLC2000)

Suppose you have chosen the Business Letter Corpus, you will receive the following search result (the sample shows only the first 20 line) within a few seconds if the system is not too busy.
 

Bigram Plussearch result:  Word 1: as  No. of intervening words: 3  Word 2: as  Search Corpus: 01. Business Letter Corpus (BLC2000)  The combination "as + [W=<3] + as" was found 843 time(s): 281  as soon as 244  as well as   41  as much as   26  as quickly as   18  as far as   16  as long as   15  as little as   12  as early as   11  as low as     8  as good as     4  as often as     4  as productive as     4  as fast as     4  as many as     4  as important as     3  as successful as     3  as eager as     3  as many copies as     3  as much time as     3  as tough as   [snip]

Regular expressions can now be used as a search string (July 13, 2001). Try the following combination to see if it really works:

  Word 1: infor(m|med|ming) 
  No. of intervening words: 1 
  Word 2: (of|about) 
  
See  "Regular Expressions for Beginners" on the main Concordarcer page for more about regular expressions.  

(c) 2001 Yasumasa Someya, LOGOS Language Systems Institute.