By limiting the proximity, these phrases can be matched while avoiding documents where the words are scattered or spread across a page or in unrelated articles in an anthology.
As an added benefit, proximity searching helps combat spamdexing by avoiding webpages which contain dictionary lists or shotgun lists of thousands of words, which would otherwise rank highly if the search engine was heavily biased toward word frequency.
Sometimes query operators like NEAR, NOT NEAR, FOLLOWED BY, NOT FOLLOWED BY, SENTENCE or FAR are used to indicate a proximity-search limit between specified keywords: for example, "brick NEAR house".
This is useful if the user wants to do a prior art search (e.g. finding an existing approach to complete a specific task, finding a document that discloses a system that exhibits a procedural behavior collaboratively conducted by several components and links between these components).
search engines is possible using the asterisk (*) full-word wildcards: in Google this matches one or more words,[9] and an in Yahoo!