I’ve always been annoyed by software that makes a distinction between upper and lower case. Other than passwords, there is no reason why a human should care. The only programmers who care are either too anal or too much like a computer to recognize that this is just weird. I’m not sure which group Google’s coders fall into, but they do have some weird ideas about case that can break your Google Alerts.
One example is using the word or to separate multiple terms. Google requires you to capitalize it as OR. If you create an alert with or instead, Google will ignore it. The funny thing is that when or is ignored, Google then assumes that you want to and all the words. So a search for pizza OR beer will work and give you alerts for either word, but pizza or beer will only give you alerts where both words are found.
The exact opposite rule applies to special search operators, such as intitle: or site:. These must be in lower case, or else Google will actually search for these words. For example, a search for intitle:pizza will only deliver alerts where pizza is found in the title, but INTITLE:pizza will look for alerts with both the words intitle and pizza anywhere in the page.
The worst part about this for Google Alerts is that when you create an alert there is no warning if you enter something Google doesn’t understand. You just don’t get any alerts, or you get the wrong ones, which is why you should try every alert query as a Google search first.
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