Keyword Research: Does Google view the word "and" as an "or" statement

[EricVallee34]

I'm doing keyword research and one of the terms I have found that work for my website are "exercise and vitamins".  One of my colleagues told me that Google views searches that contain the word "and" as an "or" statement (i.e., the searcher is looking for either "excercise" or "vitamins").  My understanding of the word "and" is that it is a stop word, which is ignored by Google.

Which is correct?

[IM_Learner]

Eric, you are absolutely correct - "and" and "or" are stop words and are ignored by Google. While doing the keyword research you will come across key phrases consisting of stop words because they were searched for.

What Spencer has written is absolutely correct but i feel that here we are merging two different things.

You can definitely use "exercise and vitamins"

[EricVallee34]

Just to clarify, if I'm trying to optimize a page for people interested in learning more about how vitamins impact on exercise; then would I be correct to use the "and" (as in "exercise and vitamins")?

[EricVallee34]

Just to clarify, if I'm trying to optimize a page for people interested in learning more about how vitamins impact on exercise; then would I be correct to use the "and" (as in "exercise and vitamins")?

[MarloSchneider]

The and operator is an and operator, not an OR.  It works like you would think it would.

Straight from the mouth of Google:

"The OR operator
Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example,

• [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)"

Link to the operator page:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861