The more you know about searching, the better your results:
Use Wildcards (XX*)
Schoo* in Google searches for school, schools or schooling, and colo*r searches for color (US) or colour (UK).
Use Quotation Marks (“XX”)
Quotation Marks around keywords or phrases searches for words side by side in the same order. This is great for book titles, songs or plays you are studying eg “planet of the apes”.
Plus (+) and Minus (-)
Plus and minus before keywords forces words to be included or excluded in a phrase. So spain +cities -madrid gives Spanish cities but not Madrid.
Use other search engines
We all know Google, but it’s not the only search engine to use. Yahoo, Dogpile, Ask, Alltheweb, Gigablast and Exalead could be better at finding what you want next time.
Use advanced search
Google’s advanced search helps you be more specific, and search by date, language, file format and even synonym.
The more you learn about your search engine the better your results, so experiment.