Exalead (http://www.exalead.com/) has enhanced its NEAR command by
allowing searchers to specify how close they want their search terms to
be to one another. By default, NEAR looks for your terms within 16 words
of one another in the order specified. You can now specify the maximum
number of words that can separate your terms by using NEAR/n.
For example:
climate NEAR/2 change
finds climate followed by change but separated by up to 2 words.
climate NEAR/5 change
finds your terms separated by up to 5 words.
It is interesting that Exalead is resurrecting some of the search
options that used to be standard but have been dropped by most of the
major search engines. AltaVista used to have a NEAR command but this
disappeared soon after it was bought by Yahoo.
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