6. Proximity: the NEAR-operator

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What if you are looking for a sequence of words that are normally connected, but that may be split by other words? If you were looking for information on the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, you could possibly search for a phrase, like this:

"Thomas Alva Edison"

But this search would not bring you pages where the name is given as Thomas A. Edison or Thomas Edison. You could solve this problem by entering

or you could use the NEAR search operator. NEAR means "show me pages where these words are near each other".

How near is NEAR? That depends. In AltaVista the words used to be less than 10 words apart.

dogs near/3 cats

finds documents in which dog and cat occur within three words of each other, in either order."

By altering the number, you can decide how far apart the keyword can be in order to be included in the results.

Until Yahoo! took over the company, AltaVista Advanced Search allowed use of this operator. After it started using the Yahoo! search engine for its results AltaVista no longer supports NEAR.

The only regular web search site allowing this operator until recently was -- interestingly enough -- AOL's version of Google: AOL Search.

Unfortunately AOL seems no longer to be supporting NEAR.

However, there is a relatively new European search engine on the block that do support quite a few advanced search features, including NEAR and that is Exalead.

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