There is a phrase “you can continue enjoying relaxing comfortably” with two “ing” verb forms, one after the other: enjoying relaxing
I want to find every instance of that constructon in one of my databases, so verb-ing, verb-ing: *ing *ing
I was hoping to do with a simple boolean search but can’t quite seem to get it to work.
Any suggestions for me?
Thanks!
Ryan
Surprisingly, this seems to work with whole words, but not with parts of them. Or I’m doing something wrong.
Development would have to assess this.
A phrase search should work: text:"*ing *ing"
I probably just don’t see it. Can you explain why one works and the other doesn’t?
This one works:
This not:
Look closer at @cgrunenberg’s example
Indeed it does. Thank you.
text:“*ing *ing”
works like a charm.
@chrillek It’s probably just me, but I don’t understand what you mean. The example of @cgrunenberg only finds words in direct succession.
And that was the original question. And in the answer, @cgrunenberg used quotes. You didn’t. Also, he didn’t use NEAR. You did.
text:"*ing *ing"
does find things like “testing and working”. I just tried it.
I assume in your favor that you are not doing this on purpose 
yes, that is what I wanted and it is a huge help for what I am doing which is searching decades of digitized material of an MD, Psychiatrist and hypnotist called Milton H. Erickson.
And I made it even more specific to my original intent by add the suffix of the last word to the sentence:
text:“*ing *ing *ly”
to find similar to:
enjoying, relaxing comfortably.
The NEAR operator is not useful in these searches as it does not find the two -ing verbs when they are sequential (which is a bit strange).
Peace!
Ryan
Actually that is a good point. When I use
*ing NEAR *ing
(with or without quotes)
it returns fewer results and does not give me any of the sequential results where the words are next to each other…
