How to Do Proximity Searches in Google

Most of the paid and free legal research products offer proximity search (i.e., the ability to search for documents that have keywords within a certain number of specified words or paragraphs).

And, to the surprise of most people, Google also allows you to do proximity searches with the AROUND(n) connector. AROUND must be typed in upper case and you replace the “n” with a number specifying how many words you want your keywords to be from each other.

For example, when you search malpractice AROUND(10) pinnington, you get 5,900 hits where malpractice is within 10 words of pinnington.

Remember to try the AROUND(n) proximity search connector next time you are trying to find documents with terms that might be close, but not next to, each other. One of the common places this occurs is with names. You may get simple first and last names, but there might be pages with middle initials or full middle names.