There is an old saying that it is a poor workman that blames his tools. The same could be said for anyone that complains about not being able to find anything on the Internet. It's true that your typical single word search, "tools" for example, on any of the popular web search engines will return anywhere from over 240 million hits (search lingo for individual web pages found) on Microsoft's Live.com search engine to nearly 2 billion hits on Google. Wading through a list like that to find what you're really after is an impossible task, but you shouldn't blame the search engine. Using a single word search to find something on the web is like using sandpaper to clean your glasses... in your attempt to see things more clearly, you end up making things all the more blurry.

If you want to make your searches more effective, you are going to have to learn to use your tools more effectively. Just as a master carpenter would use different tools and techniques to transform a piece of stock into a beautiful table top, so you should use more than one method to build your search. The most simple and effective way to improve your search results is to use phrase searching. This allows you to find web pages that contain two or more words in a particular order. Most search engines will perform phrase searching when you enclose the words in double quotes. If we change our single word search from "tools" to "carving tools", the number of hits on Live.com is reduced to a mere 138 thousand hits and Google's results are now just over 353 thousand hits, a reduction of about 99.98% on the pages you now need to wade through. Not bad for adding just one more word, but there are still enough pages to make the task of reading them all humanly impossible.

Combining your phrase search with additional terms (search lingo for a word or other group of letters or numbers) will give your search more context and can reduce the number of results even more. For instance, if you were interested in buying chip carving tools, you could try your search again with: "carving tools" chip purchasing canada. If you don't find what you're looking for with a given set of terms, you can try swapping out words with their synonyms. In our example, you could use the word "buying" instead of "purchasing" or even the phrase "for sale".

So far we've added and put words together in different ways to improve our search results, but search engines also provide additional ways to refine our results. Many offer an advanced search page that lets you "build" a search query by combining several different types of searches. Google lets you type in an advanced search at any time using search "operators" (search lingo for special words that change the way a search operates). For instance, the "inurl:" operator finds hits with addresses (or URLs) containing the next word in your search. This is useful if you remember only a part of a web address. Indeed, this operator is so useful that "the bad guys" use it to find websites that offer a particular type of program. If they can figure out how to break into one website's purchasing system that uses software with a unique word in the address, then the "inurl:" operator can be used to find other vulnerable sites that use the same software. The "site:" operator which Google offers is also helpful to limit a search to a particular website. I have used this on more than one occasion when I find a site's navigation system less than useful.

Of course, when searching you are not limited to the "Big Three" of search engines (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!). There are many search engines dedicated to specific topics and specific types of content. Trying your searches out on several different search engines is a good idea since each engine has a different ranking scheme pushing different hits to the top of the list... important if you are the type to only look through the first page of search results.

Web searching is by no means a stagnant field of technology. There are always new pieces being developed. Google offers alerts that will e-mail you whenever a new page is found given your search terms. Microsoft Live is experimenting with search macros that help limit search results to given topics. Yahoo has a search limited to items with a Creative Commons license. Google is even letting you "roll your own" search engines using their technologies.

The Internet is filled with so much information that finding the one page you need can be an adventure. Learning to use your search tools can make the adventure easier and more rewarding.