Find website URLs that begin with http:// or https://
Variable Names

Variables should be lower-cased and snake-case, meaning that multiple words should look like some_variable, not someVariable or SomeVariable. I think the name you've chosen for your regex is good and expresses exactly what it is:

protocol_regex = re.compile(...)


Checking length of a list/container data structure

It is not considered pythonic to check the emptiness of a container in python by using if len(container) == 0, most* containers have a __bool__ method built-in that allows you to do if not container for an empty one and if container for non-empty:

from collections import deque

if not {}:
    print("empty dict")
empty dict

if not []:
    print("empty list")
empty list

if not '':
    print("empty string")
empty string

if not deque():
    print("empty deque")
empty deque

if ['result1']:
    print('non-empty list')
non-empty list


One of the few that does not behave this way is queue.Queue, which I've included to give context to the most comment.

With this in mind, change your match check to:

if matches:
    # rest of code
else:
    # else code here