There are several ways to search for information and often times the easiest is to just type the keyword in a search engine like Google and hope that it would find the article of interest. However, things are not quite simple when you look for things and hundreds of hits come up. For example, if you were searching for this blog then instead of using http://www.google.com you will be better of searching specifically for blogs at http://blogsearch.google.com.
Here are some other hints:
No personalization: Search engines try to personalize the search to you. So if you are logged into your Google account and then search on the web, the web search will try to personalize the search – to your location or any other parameters that you may have specified earlier. This works well if you were looking for “socks” earlier and the search engine now tries to target ad’s that are specific for socks. One way to turn off the personalized search and tracking is to either a) <easiest> log out of your account or b) type “&pws=0” at the end of the search page URL. So for example you would type www.google.com&pws=0.
Here are some additional things that you can do enhance the searches. These are specific for Google but vary only slightly with other search engines like Bing or Yahoo. Add these operators before the keywords that you type – as example if you were searching for a cache of this website – usinlife.com you would use “cache:www.usinlife.com”
Search operators related to Websites
Cache: This shows the stored website for a particular domain. For e.g. cache:www.usinlife.com
Link: This finds other webpages that link to this website.
Related: This finds websites related to the current search or URL.
Info: Presents information that the search engine has about the website or URL.
Search operators related to keywords
Define: This provides the definition of the keyword
Site: This finds web pages located only within the website you specify. So if you were looking for the word “sock” you would find thousands of website but typing “site:www.usinlife.com socks” will specifically lead you to this page since it mentions the word “sock”.
Intitle: The keywords is searched in title tag of the webpage
Inurl: Finds websites that have a specific keyword in their URL.