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Forcing Google to Match Any of Your Keywords
By default, Google returns pages that match each and every one of the keywords that you enter into the search box. What if you enter only two keywords and want pages that have one or the other, but not necessarily both of the keywords?
A good example of this would be if you want to learn more about home equity loans. Home equity loans can also be called Home equity lines of credit. In order to search for both of those terms, you would put the following in a search box:
You will find that when you perform that search, you get the following results:
Note that your results contain pages that talk about home equity loans and home equity lines of credit. If you were to search using just one of the terms, you would exclude some search results that might be potentially useful.
How the OR Operator Works
In order to use the OR in a search, be sure to type it in capital letters. If you type the lowercase or into a search box, Google will simply treat that instance of the word “or” as a keyword in a normal search.
Let’s look a little more closely at the previous search. If you haven’t yet read the tutorial on how to use quotes, I recommend reading it before going any further. You can find it by clicking here.
We entered the following into the search box:
“home equity” “line of credit” OR loan
The first part “home equity” means that we want to find that exact phrase in our results. The next part, “line of credit” means that we want that exact phrase as well. This will prevent Google from returning results that contain those words, but not in that order. For example, Google will exclude pages with the phrase “credit line” because although both of those words are keywords in our search, they are not in that order. The quotes force Google to only find that exact phrase.
Next, we typed the OR operator. The OR operator in this search means that Google will find pages that contain the phrase “line of credit” or “loan”. This is useful because if we left out the OR, Google would only return pages that contain both line of credit and loan.
The OR operator only looks at the keyword (or phrase if it is in quotes) before and after it. In our example, all of our results will contain the phrase home equity, but after that, they only have to contain one of the next two keywords/phrases, which in our case was line of credit and loan.
Feeling confused? If so, we can do one more example to hopefully simplify things.
A Simpler Example
Let’s say you want to search for carnations. You know you want Google to find pages about white and pink carnations. You could perform two Google searches, one for white carnations and one for pink carnations. However, to get the results of both of those searches into just one search, you can use the OR operator as follows:
When you search for that, you will get a page akin to the following:
You can see that your first two page results (which come after Google’s shopping results) are for pink carnations and then for white carnations. As you can see, the OR operator can save a lot of time by making Google find one or the other of the two keywords it falls between.
If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the comments section below!
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