Deep Content: Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet:
"Your ability to find the information you seek on the Internet is a function of how precise your queries are and how effectively you use search services. Poor queries return poor results; good queries return great results. Contrary to the hype surrounding 'intelligent agents' and 'artificial intelligence,' the fact remains that search results are only as good as the query you pose and how you search. There is no silver bullet.

There are very effective ways to 'structure' a query and use special operators to target the results you seek. Absent these techniques, you will spend endless hours looking at useless documents that do not contain the information you want. Or you will give up in frustration after search-click-download-reviewing long lists of documents before you find what you want."

This outstanding website is, without question, one of the most comprehensive online resources for learning efficient Internet search techniques. The guide begins with some fairly non-technical background about the Internet and explains why searching such a massive amount of information is more complex than it seems. The general process used by search engines to rank webpages is described. After covering the fundamentals of search engine operation, the guide discusses some best practices to use when conducting a search. Keyword selection, phrasing, and Boolean operators are just a few of the concepts discussed to help users make their searching more effective. The guide also compares many top search engines, noting the supported features, coverage, and type of indexing associated with each. From The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, & Technology, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2003. http://www.scout.wisc.edu/

http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/NSDL/MET/2003/met-031219-printable.html#12

http://www.brightplanet.com/deepcontent/tutorials/search/index.asp