near:

Constrains the distance between terms so that documents that contain instances of the specified terms within ten words of each other are returned before those that don’t.

Example

foo near:10 bar

Remarks

Ordering is considered in ranking. Thus, in this example, pages that contain bar ten words or less after foo would receive a greater boost in rank than pages in which foo appears ten words or less after bar. However, depending on the rest of the query, this does not necessarily mean that the former would be ranked higher than the latter.