NEAR Search Operator

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1

Thanks for the great product. It’s a great help to my research and workflow.

I am a little confused on something. If I open a search window and use the NEAR search operator, I don’t quite get the expected results. I can search for:

Rewritten NEAR “Scribal Habits”

Yet, when I start to look as these results, they are not at what I expect. What I expect is that Rewritten would be within 10 words (as the default) of “Scribal Habits.” This isn’t the case. Most cases only return rewritten with scribal habits no where to be found. Is there something wrong here?

2
  1. Check if you’re searching on ALL, when you should be looking at Contents.
  2. Check if you have “In Selection” selected.
3

One of the limitations when searching using the NEAR operator is that all the search terms found in the document are highlighted, even the ones that are not NEAR one another. In other words, searching for Rewritten NEAR “Scribal Habits” will locate the documents that meet that criteria, but all occurrences of ‘Rewritten’ and ‘Scribal Habits’ will be highlighted in the document, even though on an individual basis they do not meet the NEAR criteria.

4

I’m still battling to get my head around that particular behaviour - surely if one wanted all the hits highlighted, one would fashion the search criteria accordingly - therefore, NEAR/5 etc. should only return hits that match the NEAR criteria?

I’m not nearly clued up enough to grasp the complexities of search algorithms - so maybe there’s a perfectly good reason for the above, but I’m clearly too slow to grasp it! :laughing:

5

It would be very useful if only the NEAR items were highlighted in a searched document. As it is, the search only tells me that the NEAR item is somewhere in the document. This sucks for long documents and common terms. Am I missing something here?