Report:FreePatentsOnline/Search Syntax/Allowed Operators/Boolean and Proximity Operators
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Boolean and Proximity Operators
FreePatentsOnline has a selection of commonly supported operators (including Boolean, proximity, and truncation operators), and offers the notable addition of relevancy operators. See the truncation section for more details on both.
Proximity operators in FreePatentsOnline are non-order specific, and the distance between the two words can be specified. Multiple words can be searched within a fixed maximum radius or distance from each other. For example, to find “wrench” within 5 words of “nut,” the user would input: “wrench nut”~5. When used with more than two terms, this operator specifies the maximum distance between the two terms that occur farthest away from one another. As an example, the entry “monkey wrench nut”~5 would return a result with the words “monkey,” “wrench,” and “nut” within 5 words of the furthest-apart words. Proximity operators based on semantic structure such as “same sentence” and “same paragraph” operators are not present in FreePatentsOnline.
Stemming in FreePatentsOnline is a preference that can be turned on or off within the Expert Search or Quick Search tabs. Stemming cannot be applied to individual words in a search query.
