lexis nexis

A variation on the use of the w/2 connector (searching for words that appear within two words of each other) that you can use when searching for a person’s name, is the pre/2 connector between the first and the last name.

This will find stories in which a person’s first and last names are within two words of each other (so you retrieve stories in which a middle name is used), but only if the first name appears before the last name.

This is helpful when searching for someone whose last name is also a common first name or word, such as Congressman Barney Frank. Thus you could search for:

Barney pre/2 Frank

That would only retrieve stories in which the word Barney preceded the word Frank by two or fewer words.

Thus you wouldn't get any stories about people named Frank Barney.

Note: Don't use the pre/2 connector when searching for people's names in a public records database. That's because people are often listed last name, then first name in such databases.