Like in the Advanced Search, NEAR means that the search terms must be within 10 words of each other. NEAR can be entered in upper or lower case and can be nested. This can be used as internal truncation or end truncation. A minimum of three characters before the truncation symbol is required. Also, the wildcard matches only lowercase characters not uppercase letters or numbers.
Searches are case sensitive.
If search terms are entered completely in lower case, all mixtures of upper and lower case are searched. See AltaVista's field list or the descriptions below. Do not leave a space after the field name or after the colon. Pages containing a Java applet with the term in the name. For top-level domain only.