Maybe it's how you approach products or the space you've been in, but the ability to do "OR" has come up quite frequently for me, and on the opposite side of things, I often am very frustrated when products with search do not let me do OR.
Pretty much any log search interface, I use Papertrail. Google search. For the feature I am currently working on, it's an audit trail for the operations we run and OR is required. I wish the various searches on GitHub supported "or".
Additionally, tons of products do support "OR". Take the Amazon search. It has sections that are "OR" inside of them and "AND" across the sections.
Outside of product search, there certainly are user customizable OR functions in search. That's why I said that the product search example the article gave is probably not a good example. Because in product search it is very, very unusual and not something users expect.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean with the Amazon search, but I have the feeling that what you refer to is not the type of user customizable OR that the article used as an example.
Can you link to such an Amazon search with "OR" and "AND"?
Literally any Amazon search is an OR and an AND. For example, I want products below 200 euros and brands speedo or quicksilver.
If you mean an Amazon search that allows you to explicitly type this in, they don't and, sorry, I was probably not explicit enough in what I am saying.
Now my point is, OR does show up very often in product search, but, it's usually very limited in that it's OR within a category and AND across categories, and there is a pretty standard interface for expressing this.
products below 200 euros and brands speedo or quicksilver
That is what I expected you could mean. Yes, that is a popular pattern. But it is not customizable like the "bicycles that are (made of steel AND weigh from 10 to 20kg) OR (made of carbon AND weigh from 5 to 10kg)" given in the article. When you select two brands on Amazon, they are always connected via OR and when you select the 200 euros, that is always connected to the rest via AND. So the typical
search?brands=speedo,quicksilver&priceMax=200
works.
The point of the article is that this does not work for customizable AND OR constructs, and therefore one should use SQL. And then it gives the bicycles example, stating that this feature request comes up "faster than you can imagine". But no, it almost never comes up in product search. I have not seen it even once in the last 9 years among the thousands of feature requests I looked at.
