How do I do proximity search in Oracle right?

Question

Oracle's NEAR operator for full text search returns a score based on the proximity of two or more query terms. For example:

near((dog, bite), 6)

matches if 'dog' and 'bite' occurs within 6 words. What if I'd like it to match if either 'dog' or 'cat' or any other type of animal occurs within 6 words of the word 'bite'? I tried:

near(((dog OR cat OR animal), bite), 6)

but I got:

NEAR operand not a phrase, equivalence or another NEAR expression

Rather than expanding all possible combination into multiple NEAR and 'or' them together, what is the proper way to write such query?

Answer 1

Looks like the EQUIV operator should do it. Doc Ref.

You can also use the equivalence operator to substitute a single term in a near query:

'near((stock crash, Japan=Korea), 20)'

This query asks for all documents that contain the phrase stock crash within twenty words of Japan or Korea.