Search question from a user: NEAR in OneNote searching

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The other day I got the following question via my blog:

How come I cannot get the NEAR search operator to find anything in OneNote 2007 no matter what I try? I have just installed the new SP1 Office pack but the problem remains.

The AND and OR operators work fine.

The user was having a problem getting the NEAR operator to work in OneNote 2007 whereas it worked in OneNote 2003.  I asked a few of our search gurus and they told me the following answer:

NEAR was removed in OneNote 12 since WDS does not support it

As some of you may know OneNote 2007 uses the Windows Desktop Search engine for search operations and therefore we are constrained by what the platform offers us.  Not many of you use Boolean search methods but we do support AND and OR because WDS does.  Hope this post helps some of you out there.  Take care!

 Update 2008-03-03: I got a few emails from internal people at Microsoft and they told me that I should correct this.  They said my blog should say that: While WDS supports the concept of NEAR, AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) doesn’t.  There you go!