I think it does! You probably know that an asterisk stands in for a single word in a query, but if you add more asterisks then it stands in for more words. How

I think it does! You probably know that an asterisk stands in for a single word in a query, but if you add more asterisks then it stands in for more words. However, there's not a one-to-one correspondence between asterisks and words skipped. A "few" asterisks means skip a "few" words, and more asterisks means the words can be farther apart. So you can search for foo NEAR bar with something like foo * bar. At least, that was my understanding, but I can't seem to find that spelled out anywhere online after a quick search just now, so I could be way off.