I read throught the discussion group regarding proximity searches. There
have been some discussions about proximity searches since about 1998,
all of which noted that SWISH -E does not support proximity searches.
However, now it does support phrase searches -- the closest kind of
proximity, and it looked like the index contains a number that looks
like the distance of a word from the start of the document-- something
that would be necessary for the phrase search.(but I guess this
could be the word count described by one of the earlier commenters.)

My questions are:
    a) Does the index now contain a word distance from the start of a
document?
  b)  Does the phrase search represent a kind of proximity search as I
have assumed?
  c) Is there now something in the works for defining proximity in terms
of word counts?

On a slightly different note. The tags do provide a way to find a word
(or phrase) within a particular tag. Is htere a way to find word A AND
word B between a particular instance of a tag pair. The way we interpret
ANd logic about words in relation to tags,  there is no accounting for
whether two words were found in the same instance of a tag pair. or
whether one word was found in the first instance of a tag pair and the
other word in another instance.

So you could not tell the difference between the two cases when looking
for Hello world.

 Document 1
    <tag a> Hello  World < tag a/>


Document 2
   <tag a> hello <tag a/>
    <tag a> world <tag /a>

This is important to our application where we may have diagnoses made up
of an anatomic part and and a pathology part e.g.
Document 1
  <diagnosis> Prostate benign < diagnosis>
 < diagnosis > Colon cancer < diagnosis>

Think SWISH-E would find  this document contains Prostate cancer>

Many thanks for any information.





--
Director, Regenstrief Institute
Regenstrief Professor of Medical Informatics
Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Indiana University School of Medicine
1050 Wishard Blvd  RG5
Indianapolis  IN  46202-2872
Phone:  317/630-7070
Fax:  317/630-6962
URL:  www.regenstrief.org