NEAR N Operator

Selects documents containing two or more words within N number of words of each other, where N is an integer. Document scores are calculated based on the distance of the specified words when they are separated by N words or less.

Like the NEAR operator, the NEAR/N operator compares the proximity of the search terms in each document to the proximity of the search terms in each of the other documents and assigns scores based on its calculations. Unlike the NEAR operator, the NEAR/N operator returns search results only for documents where the search terms are within N words of one another. A document where the specified words do not occur within five words of each another is not returned in the search results.

The N variable can be any integer between 1 and 1,024, where NEAR/1 searches for two words that are next to each other. If N is 1,000 or above, you must specify its value without commas, as in NEAR/1000. You can specify multiple search terms using multiple instances of NEAR/N, as long as the value of N is the same.

For example, to retrieve relevance-ranked documents that contain stemmed variations of the words "commute," "bicycle," "train," and "bus" within 10 words of each one another, you can enter the following:

Related Links

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NEAR/N Operator