How Does Fuzziness & Proximity Help?
A Fuzzy search attempts to enlarge the search by allowing the search engine to find words spelled nearly the same as the ones you entered. It does this by simple letter substitution. For example a Fuzzy search on "Macdonald" returns records with "McDonald" and "Macdonalds" as well. A Fuzzier search adds variations like "Donald."
Proximity is a measure of how close words are together. For example, searching "macdonald farm" with a proximity of 5 would match on "old Macdonald had a farm" because the 2 words are within 5 words of each other.
Most newspapers use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for providing searching, and OCR does not always generate accurate text. Fuzziness and Proximity are two potential tools to help find content that might otherwise be hidden.