Any fancy grep utility replacements out there?

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So I need to recursively grep a bunch of gzipped files.  This can't be
easily done with grep, rgrep or zgrep.  (I'm sure given the right
pipeline including using the find command it could be done....but
seems like a hassle).

So I figured I'd find a fancy next generation grep tool.  Thirty
minutes of searching later I find a bunch in Perl, and even one in
Ruby.  But I can't find anything that interesting or up to date for
Python.  Does anyone know of something?

Thanks