Regular expression search engine

March 21, 2006 4:51 AM

Is there any regular expression based search engine or search engine that allows to search for one word in the vicinity of another word, like say word1 within 10 words of word2 ?

I remember altavista had this facility (i.e. one word within n words of another word) several years ago, but I can no longer see it now.

posted by inquisitive to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You can search for something like "big * * * tomato" on Google, with moderate results.
posted by Plutor at 4:56 AM on March 21, 2006 [1 favorite]

Years ago the Verity search engine provided that. The magic relationship is called "NEAR" (ie, word1 NEAR word2). There's a decent enough little blurb about NEAR in the context of search engines here.
posted by plinth at 5:41 AM on March 21, 2006

You can't set the vicinity window, but google allows "(" and ")" to wrap words that you want to appear nearby but not immediately following one another.

I just tried it with "(best worst)" versus " "best worst" " and it seems to perform correctly.
posted by zpousman at 6:04 AM on March 21, 2006

True regular expressions can get quite computationally expensive, so you are unlikely to find the full power of REs on a widely-used public web site like Google. See the discussion here.
posted by grouse at 6:43 AM on March 21, 2006

Verity still has this feature, as do nearly all locally-installed search engines. Engines crawling truly massive datasets can't handle it, as grouse says.
posted by nev at 11:00 AM on March 21, 2006

Kevin Shay has coded what he calls Google API Proximity Search (GAPS) which allows you to search for words within up to three words of each other. I have found it pretty handy in the past.
posted by Tawita at 12:27 PM on March 21, 2006

I foggily remember a 'near' operator as well. But it might have been Altavista, back when it was the bitchin' new search engine in town.
posted by misterbrandt at 12:48 PM on March 21, 2006

Exalead
posted by MLIS at 7:04 PM on March 21, 2006