On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 11:58 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes: > Does anyone know why the phrase distance "<3>" was changed from "at most > three tokens away" to "exactly three tokens away"?
So that it would correctly support phraseto_tsquery's use of the operator to represent omitted words (stopwords) in a phrase.
I think there's probably some use in also providing an operator that does "at most this many tokens away", but Oleg/Teodor were evidently less excited, because they didn't take the time to do it.
I would say that it is worth it to have a "phrase slop" operator (Apache Lucene terminology). Proximity search is extremely useful for improving relevance and phrase slop is one of the tools to achieve that.
