Search for multiple labels on Blogger

Labels for posts and displaying pages containing only articles with a specific label are pretty basic features for any blogging platform. But what if you want to search for several labels and retrieve articles that contain all those labels or any label? Is that even possible? I asked myself this at some point and a comment from yesterday prompted me to finally find the answer.

One of the solutions I discovered on the Blogger help forums uses search with a query in this format: <blog-URL>/search/?q=label:LABEL1+label:LABEL2. This returns posts with both labels. I tested it myself and it works, but it’s hard to manually build the URL and the search is case sensitive, meaning that it will return no results it you don’t input the label name exactly as created in Blogger.

While playing around on the blog I discovered an easier way to do this: modify the normal label URL in Blogger by adding a + sign followed by the name of the second label: <blog-URL>search/label/LABEL1+LABEL2. It’s easier to remember and to type, but it’s also case sensitive. It actually works with more than two labels – I only tested it with three, so I’m not sure if there is a limit to the number of labels you can add in the URL. I don’t use any labels with multiple words so I couldn’t test this case, but it’s safe to assume you need to escape spaces by replacing them with %20 just like Blogger does with the regular label pages.

But what about the other case, when you want to find posts with any of those labels – the OR operator instead of AND? Unfortunately the second option doesn’t seem to support OR, but the first one does: just replace the + in the search query with a vertical bar like this: <blog-URL>/search/?q=label:LABEL1|label:LABEL2. It’s fun to see this in action especially with labels that have very little to do with one another.