If you need to find a site written in a specific language, use Alta Vista which allows you to choose a language before you search, with a drop down menu. Babel Fish will allow you to translate the page when you have one in a language you don’t understand.

Sometimes pictures are the only way to be sure that you are looking for the right thing. Above the google search box is a link called images. Perhaps you have just seen a baboon but you don’t what it is called. Using the images box you could key in monkey AND blue face OR red bottom. When you have found a picture you can go to the sites that display it and get its common name and often its scientific name as well, then you can use its name to search for more information.

Lastly don’t forget right click. If you have a page of results that you like from a search you don’t have to keep going back and forward. Just right click on a link and choose open in a new window. To open and close a single site this way takes less time than reloading a search result page each time.

Using symbols to narrow a search.
Use a + sign before a word to tell your search engine that you want the word to be in all results the search engine finds. For example if you want to search for information about being pregnant with twins you might enter pregnancy twins in the box. This will return all the results for each of these keywords. Alternately pregnancy + twins will only return those pregnancy results that have the word twins on the same page, narrowing your search to more relevant results.

Use the – sign before a word to exclude meanings that you are not interested in. For example King James – bible will not return pages with this key phrase . Reduce your results by excluding words that are often grouped but have no relevance to your search topic which in this case is Kings by the name of James.

Use an * as a wild card for spellings. Place the asterix at the end of your word and your search will include variants of the word. If you enter flower*, pages will be shown that include the words flower, flowers, flowering, flowered – that is any extensions or alternate endings of your keyword.

To find an exact phrase put it in double quotation marks. “seven wonders of the world” will bring fewer and more relevant results than seven wonders of the world which will return pages that may only have the single words seven, wonders and world on them.

Different search engines have different ways of listing results. Google prioritises results according to how close together the search terms appear so it performs well with these phrases. Quotes still help with phrases where common word combinations overlap, by defining order. “run my blog” will return different results to “blog my run” but blog run will return both. Sorry I couldn’t think of a better example, maybe someone could suggest one, but you get my point.