FWIW: i think this is a really cool and interesting question. : Is there a way to specify in a query that a term must match at least X : times in a document, where X is some value greater than 1?
at the moment, i think your "phrase query" approach is really the only viable way (allthough it did get me thinking about how hard it would be to implement this at a lower level ... i'll see if i can work out a patch) : But when I try for more than three, I start getting unexpected result : counts as I change the proximity value: Hmmm... i would think the phrase query approach should work, but it's totally possible that there's something odd in the way phrase queries work that could cause a problem -- the best way to sanity test something like this is to try a really small self contained example that you can post for other people to try. If you said "2 clauses work, but not 3" i would guess that maybe there is an "terms out of order" type issue involved, but "3 works not 4" smells fishy. -Hoss
