Analytical procedure to identify occurrences of predefined data elements in the neighborhood of a selected point or feature.
A search within a field or within a specified context unit where the proximity of words to one another has significance. Context can be sentences, paragraphs, or user-defined units.
A proximity search finds two words or a phrases which are located within a specified number of characters of each other. The search terms are more likely to be related and in the context that you intended you can still find a phrase or idea even when other words exist between the two terms.
Another technique for improving the quality of keyword searching, a proximity search lets you identify documents with certain phrases or word combinations. Such tools let you specify multiple words that occur in close proximity, and thus a better chance of correspondence, rather than two words that may be located anywhere in a single document.
A search where users to specify that documents returned should have the words near each other. Query-By-Example: A search where a user instructs an engine to find more documents that are similar to a particular document. Also called "find similar."
search in which users specify that documents returned in search results should have the words (entered into the search query) near each other.
In text processing, a proximity search looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. In addition to proximity, some implementations may also impose a constraint on the word order, in that the order in the searched text must be identical to the order of the search query. Proximity searching goes beyond the simple matching of words by adding the constraint of proximity and is generally regarded as a form of advanced search.