Search for search terms no further than *n* words apart

[BeritJanssen]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
This request came as a potential future request from the People & Parliament team: they would like to search for two search terms and make sure that they occur within close proximity to each other, not just anywhere in a document

Describe the solution you'd like
It seems the Elasticsearch intervals query might fit the bill. So I think the technical implementation should not be too much of an issue, but how to reflect this different type of query of the UI requires some consideration.

Describe alternatives you've considered
We might also post-process documents which are matches to the simple query string query - but I'm not sure that would be a better solution, as the UI question remains.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[jgonggrijp]

Does something like "firstterm secondterm"~5 OR "secondterm firstterm"~5 not already do what is asked?

[lukavdplas]

OR is redundant (and would be | in simple query string syntax), but yes, that would work 👍

I was somewhat suprised because the query documentation on I-analyzer suggests that ~ for phrases has rather different semantics. It turns out that contradicts the elasticsearch manual.

That said, the query you formulate here isn't something I would expect a non-programmer to come up with. I would support making a more beginner-friendly option for this as part of #1436

[jgonggrijp]

I think the query I suggested will match secondterm apple banana cherry date elderberry firstterm, while a simplified version without the OR and the second branch would not. Other than that, I agree those two queries would be equivalent.

[lukavdplas]

Ah, to clarify: I meant you could leave out the disjunction operator, so "firstterm secondterm"~5 "secondterm firstterm"~5.