I read an interesting post from Resource Shelf that both Google and Bing offer proximity searching. I've been quite out of touch as this has been available in Google for over five years!

The operator for Google is AROUND(x). Example: Librarians AROUND (5) awesome should find instances where 'librarians' and 'awesome' occur within five words of each other.

The operator for Bing is near:(x) Bing has quite a few other advanced search options that I wasn't aware of. Worth checking out.