sean.upton@uniontrib.com writes:
A lot of folks who do "power searches," say, librarians or other trained researchers, familiar with the bells and whistles of more powerful search engines, will want a simple operator for proximity, with the ability to specify proximity depth:
For example:
Lexis-Nexis: Sean w/2 Upton (where w/2 is within 2 words) Also, lexis doesn't count stop-words in proximity indexes. Folio/Nextpage: "Sean Upton"@2
IMHO, the syntax is clean and very brief in the Lexis-Nexis case and should suppliment a more generic Sean ... Upton style search. I do not think, it is a good idea to have an infix operator for proximity searches. This combines just 2 words but proximity searches may involve more than two words: a set of words, near together (e.g. in one paragraph, sentence, within x words).
Dieter