I really missed Altavista's NEAR operator, it was an ad-hoc page rank. Now I have new hopes with Google's late operator.
One of the classic papers on sentiment analysis utilizes this operator (in 2002, it was AltaVista's NEAR) in the algorithm.
"Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? Semantic Orientation Applied to
Unsupervised Classification of Reviews" by Peter Turney is the paper if anyone is curious.
There was some ancient DOS "e-book" software I had as a young kid that had something like this (e.g. Find "Jacob" within 32 words or 6 verses of "Esau"); finally I know how to do the same thing with the web.
Another thing to add the the Google-Fu toolbox. I wish I had this a bunch of times, since sometimes blogs will appear in search results that mention two topics I'm interested in, but not in the same article.
Wow. I'm a total search geek and I missed this one. Radian6 has a similar feature, but that's the only place I've ever seen something similar.