14. A processor-implemented service for searching for all occurrences of a queried date in a plurality of electronic documents, the service comprising: receiving the electronic documents; invoking an autonomic hardware configuration utility, wherein the electronic documents are made available to the autonomic hardware configuration utility for automatically searching for all occurrences of the queried date by: processing each of the electronic documents via extended regular expression matching to generate a canonicalized format of each occurrence of any date in any date format in the document; packaging the canonicalized format of each occurrence to support one or more types of date querying; processing a reconstruction of a span and location of one of the occurrences of the queried date after removal of html tags from crawled html content of one of the electronic documents; and outputting all occurrences of the queried date using the packaged canonicalized format.
14. A processor-implemented service for searching for all occurrences of a queried date in a plurality of electronic documents, the service comprising: receiving the electronic documents; invoking an autonomic hardware configuration utility, wherein the electronic documents are made available to the autonomic hardware configuration utility for automatically searching for all occurrences of the queried date by: processing each of the electronic documents via extended regular expression matching to generate a canonicalized format of each occurrence of any date in any date format in the document; packaging the canonicalized format of each occurrence to support one or more types of date querying; processing a reconstruction of a span and location of one of the occurrences of the queried date after removal of html tags from crawled html content of one of the electronic documents; and outputting all occurrences of the queried date using the packaged canonicalized format. 15. The service of claim 14 wherein: scanning the document for all occurrences of all dates in any date format in the document; disambiguating the format of each of the occurrences; and creating the canonicalized format for each of the disambiguated occurrences.