Google Search Basics
Google being a full-text search engine, it indexes entire web pages instead of just titles and descriptions. This allows comprehensive searches based upon key (query) words. Straight from the Google search page.
Google’s Boolean default is AND; that means if you enter query words without modifiers, Google will search for all of them.
If you search for:
snowblower Honda “Green Bay”
Google will search for all the words.
If you want to specify that either word is acceptable, you put an OR between each item:
snowblower OR snowmobile OR “Green Bay”
If you want to definitely have one term and have one of two or more other terms, you group them with parentheses, like this:
snowblower (snowmobile OR “Green Bay”)
This query searches for the word “snowmobile” or phrase “Green Bay” along with the word “snowblower.”
A stand-in for OR borrowed from the computer programming realm is the | (pipe) character, as in:
snowblower (snowmobile | “Green Bay”)
If you want to specify that a query item must not appear in your results, use a – (minus sign or dash).
snowblower snowmobile -“Green Bay”
This will search for pages that contain both the words “snowblower” and “snowmobile,” but not the phrase “Green Bay.”