Unexpected difference when using the NEAR and WITHIN n WORDS operator

Graham Criddle

This is with L10.1 RC1 on Mac

I was trying to find any references to Genesis 3 describing the "rise of humanity" as opposed to a fall. And when I used the NEAR operator, I got two results in my library, when I used WITHIN 100 WORDS I only got one!

The second is within a footnote as shown in the screenshot above.

So it looks as though the algorithms are doing something like:

• For NEAR - is the second search term contained anywhere within a footnote where the footnote indicator is near to the first search term
• For WITHIN n WORDS - is the second search term within the specified number of words  from the first search term but not taking into account any footnotes (and it's not that the footnote is too long, I still don't get a hit if I use WITHIN 1000 WORDS)

Is this how it is intended to work?

Dave Hooton

The parsing is

• NEAR can include terms in footnotes that are all within 48 CHARS
• Words within a footnote (fn) have no separation, so use AND.
• BEFORE/AFTER will include terms in footnotes.
• WITHIN/BEFORE/AFTER will need CHARS proximity  to include a term in footnotes  (CHARS includes fn and punctuation)
• WITHIN/BEFORE/AFTER with WORDS proximity will exclude terms in footnotes because fn markers are not counted i.e. the words before and after a fn character or any punctuation are separated by 1 WORD.
• THEN will ignore fn because it is defined as  BEFORE 1-1 WORDS.