Great question, Paul. True proximity searching would imply some type of distance value that meant, “Show me these words separated by no more than N words.” Google Alerts doesn’t have this syntax, but you can get close to it with the asterisk wild card. Normally I use the asterisk to find phrases that may have several variations, such as a trademark or pop culture catchphrase. For example, the phrase “Make love, not war” has endless variations, which you can find with make * not war. My favorite is Make cupcakes, not war.
The Google docs say that the asterisk only matches a single word, but that isn’t true. I have found it to match from 1 to 3 words. So you can use this as a proximity search where N is somewhere between 1 and 3.
Here is a way I might use it for my work with Google Alerts. I want to find all mentions of this, but people often describe them as Google News Alerts, Google Web Alerts, or Google Blog Alerts. They also use either alerts or alert. This search will match all of these patterns:
“google * alerts” OR “google * alert”
Do you have a Google Alerts question you need answered? Tweet me @mrgooglealerts, or leave a comment here.
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Thanks for the answering my question posted to Twitter. As a follow up, I’d like to note that according to the Wikipedia article on proximity searching, the asterisk in a Google search represents two word’s distance.