In text processing, a proximity search looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. In addition to proximity, some implementations may also impose a constraint on the word order, in that the order in the searched text must be identical to the order of the search query. Proximity searching goes beyond the simple matching of words by adding the constraint of proximity and is generally regarded as a form of advanced search. For example, a search could be used to find "red brick house", and match phrases such as "red house of brick" or "house made of red brick". 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. Rationale The basic linguistic assumption of proximity searching is that the proximity of the words in a document implies a relationship between the words. Given that authors of documents try to formulate sentences which contain a single idea, or cluster of related ideas within neighboring sentences or organized into paragraphs, there is an inherent, relatively high, probability within the document structure that words used together are related. On the other hand, when two words are on the opposite ends of a book, the probability of a relationship between the words is relatively weak. By limiting search results to only include matches where the words are within the specified maximum proximity, or distance, the search results are assumed to be of higher relevance than the matches where the words are scattered. Commercial internet search engines tend to produce too many matches (known as recall) for the average search query. Proximity searching is one method of reducing the number of pages matches, and to improve the relevance of the matched pages by using word proximity to assist in ranking. 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. Boolean syntax and operators Note that a proximity search can designate that only some keywords must be within a specified distance. Proximity searching can be used with other search syntax and/or controls to allow more articulate search queries. Sometimes