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The Internet is, in a word, vast. There are not million but billions of pages out there, and at least one of them must have just the piece of information you're looking for. So how do you sort through all of that overwhelming bounty of information to get just the information you're looking for?

Enter Google. Used well, the search engine with the plain white homepage can quite literally bring a world of information to your fingertips.

Used poorly, though, and Google can make you yearn for the days of card catalogs and harried librarians.

We've all had the experience of entering a search term into Google and being informed that Google found 2,684,541 results for our search - and, page after page, none of them are what we're looking for! It's important to keep in mind that, no matter how friendly those googly eyes in the logo look, at its heart, Google is just a machine - however well-designed, in the end Google has no human intuition or judgment to help it decide what, precisely, you're looking for.

Keeping that in mind can help improve your search results drastically. let's walk through a simple search to see how. Perhaps you're interested in the '80s electropop band, The Cars. Enter the word "cars" into Google, though, and you're liable to get all sorts of links to car repair sites, auto dealerships, the recent animated movie "Cars", and so on. The first link even remotely related to the band appears on the ninth page of results in the search I just ran - deep enough in to try the strongest patience.

Fortunately, Google gives you plenty of tools to help you better target your search. The first and most useful is to enclose a search term in quotes. Putting a phrase in quotes will only return pages where that exact phrase appears - those words in that order. So let's try "the cars" in quotes, and see what happens... (Here's a tip: Google doesn't pay attention to capitalization, so save a couple keystrokes and use all lower-case letters.)

Ah, now we're talking! The first four results I get are directly related to the band - not too shabby! It is more likely that a page about The Cars would use the phrase "the cars" than a page about automobiles or movies. Using quotes is incredibly useful when you remember a line from a song and want to find its title, or when you're trying to remember what movie a line was from. I use it for tech support when I have a problem with my computer; if Internet Explorer won't start, I figure someone out there who

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