Have a look at the Research Buzz post today on Google Special Syntax: The Around Operator. Evidently, Google has had a proximity operator available for the last couple of months.
The operator is a capitalized AROUND followed immediately by a number within parentheses, representing the number of words within which you'd like the second term to occur from the first search term. For example, [cameras AROUND(5) courtroom] will find, of course, "cameras in the courtroom", but also "cameras debated for sniper courtroom" and, interestingly, "Judge closes courtroom in Nodine trial to cameras." These latter are results that would have been harder to elicit using the asterisk wildcard for words.
Tara Calishain, the brains behind Research Buzz, says she may have a followup post on this, when she's finished test driving it, so stay tuned to her blog.
