Better searching in Google

You probably use Google most of the time as your main search engine (after all, most of the Western world does). But while it's an amazing engine, you can get very frustrated trying to plow through hundreds of results without finding what you want. Google has dozens of shortcuts and 'cheats' that can improve your chances of getting the right page. I won't overwhelm you with them all, but here are a few choice ones:
1) Include a phrase in double quotes, to search on the exact phrase. It's particularly important to enclose 'the' or 'and' in quotes, as otherwise Google ignores these two words.
2) If you include an asterisk (*) in the phrase, Google will search for that missing word you have forgotten.
3) Google searches don't necessarily return every page from a particular site. But you can search just a specific site by typing site:www.(sitename) and then the keywords. This often works better than a site's own internal search engine.
4) Typing the word OR will seek alternatives. Eg, Bacon OR Pork.
5)~auto looks up the word auto and synonyms.
6) printer -cartridge would exclude pages with the word cartridge from a search.
7) inurl:hobbit would find every web page that has the word hobbit in the web address (the URL). (There are 162,000 of them!)