why are gmail search operators case sensitive?

[electronicsguy]

Hello,

  I absolutely love the search within gmail and using it as part of creating filters. However, I am running into an inconvenience. sometimes, I give a long search string consisting of multiple friend's emails as part of the search or creating a filter. for example:

from:( friendA  OR   friendB  OR   friendC OR friendD)   

and so on.

now the problem is that the operators like "OR" are case sensitive. I know it is describe here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

However, its a requirement thats not required. If I type "Or" or "or" by mistake even once, the entire search shows up empty. 

the operands on either side are not-case-sensitive. For example, I could easily write "FrIeNdA OR friENDB" and it searches just fine,

Could you please explain why the case sensitive operators are required? Or at the least, some script should auto-correct the case and convert it into "OR".

that would make it much more user friendly. 

[Zack (Doc)]

Since we're all users like yourself, we can't discern Google's intentions, but I would say it's case-sensitive so you can search for messages that contain the word "or" by not capitalizing it.  As an alternative, you can "OR" searches together by using the braces instead of parentheses... so like this:

from:{friendA friendB friendC}

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[Kenneth Ayers]

I didn't know about the braces as an alternative for an ORed list.  Is there an alternative for AND as well?

[Andy]

I didn't know about the braces as an alternative for an ORed list.  Is there an alternative for AND as well?

You don't need to write 'AND'.  Just list the search terms, and Gmail assumes you want to search for all of them = implied AND.  (In fact, I didn't know 'AND' was even an allowed operator.)

Andy

[electronicsguy]

sure we could use braces. but writing in natural language, when not writing code, it more natural. To me, a good design is 

writing find (A or B)

doesn't matter what the case of either of those 3 is. Now if someone does want to find the literal word or, you could write:

find (A "or" B) 

IMHO, there must be many more instances of people using the word "or" as an operator, rather than the literal itself,

[Andy]

FYI, capitalizing OR when you mean it as an operator, predates Gmail.  It is how the Google web search rules work too.  (But the thing about Google web searches is that they are inexact, i.e. 'suggestions' to the search engine, whereas Gmail searches are exact.)

You can't make everyone happy with search rules.  Whichever way they did it, there will be people who would prefer it another way.  Either way, it is a "rule" that needs to be remembered.

Me, I have gotten quite accustomed to capitalizing OR.  I think the logic (if there is one) is that you need to do something different or unique to make it an operator ... and nothing different to have it be a search term.

Andy