A search where the user specifies that two or more terms should occur next to or within a certain number of words of each other, or within the same sentence or paragraph

Finding search terms that occur within a specified number of words in the text. Proximity searching is not as stringent as phrase searching, which requires that the terms occur in the text exactly as entered for the search. to top

If you include more than one term in your search query and separate them with the operator NEAR, the search engine will find documents that contain any one or more of the terms, even if the terms to not occur together. You can limit the distance of the terms from each other by using the NEAR/x operator, where x is the maximum number of words allowed between the search terms. For example. steam NEAR/25 generator will find all files in which generator occurs within 25 words before or after steam.