Phrase and Proximity Searching

 First let me declare some experience.  From the 1980s I was for many years an Application Design Engineer for one of the first text retrieval packages so became very familiar with the basic principles of text indexing from that era.  So I was expecting that Copernic would have the same basic features but with much more sophistication.

However I am struggling to identify how to accurately do phrase and proximity searching.  I have tried putting a phrase (including spaces) in double quotes or single quotes - but this typically returns zero hits: without quotes it returns hundreds of hits as presumably it is interpreting the phrase as a string connected by OR operators.

So I then came across the NEAR operator - by the way, where is the list of basic operators: I cannot find it anywhere in the Help system?

But exactly what does the NEAR operator do?  In the "bad old days" we could specify word X within N words of word Y.  Presumably NEAR does something like this but precisely what?

I'm sure I am missing something here, perhaps a documentation file that I haven't found yet - but to be honest it's frustrating me somewhat.

Thanks

Tim