I recall that I held off on switching to Google from AltaVista because the former didn't initially support searching for multiple phrases using the OR operator

I recall that I held off on switching to Google from AltaVista because the former didn't initially support searching for multiple phrases using the OR operator (e.g., "first phrase" OR "second phrase"). Am I misremembering? If not, then Google was worse than AltaVista on day 1, day 2, and many days that followed.