Before getting into the solutions, let's clearly state the problem. There are two general types of "bad" results from a search phrase. The first is that the information you want does not appear in response to your search phrase. The second (even more common) result is that irrelevant sites (often in droves) DO appear in the list, which of course makes it harder for you to find your proverbial needle by hiding it in a larger proverbial haystack.

Adding more search words can be somewhat useful in solving both of these problems. To use a very general example, let's say you are looking for sites on seals (as in the ocean mammel by that name). You could, of course, just type the word

seals

into the search box and go, but in addition to getting some sites relevant to what you are looking for, you are likely to get sites related to Navy seals, Easter seals, The Great Seal of the United States, and so on. If you happen to know that seals belong to the suborder Pinnipedia (as do certain other animals), you could type in

seals Pinnipedia

You would still get irrelevant results (as well as the good ones), but the irrelevant results would tend to appear further down the list than the good ones, so that would not really matter so much. Of course if you wanted to do more to actually exclude the irrelevant results you could type

+seals +Pinnipedia

into the search box, in effect telling it "Give me only those sites that have both terms". The downside of using the plus sign would be you might miss a great site that didn't happen to have the word Pinnipedia in it. You are not limited to just two search words. You could type

seals Pinnipedia ocean mammals

and so on, adding plus signs where you felt it appropriate. For instance

+seals Pinnepedia +ocean

might be a good search to try if you felt the site you are looking for would almost certainly include the words seals and ocean and might (or might not) include the word Pinnipedia. The minus sign is often useful after you have tried a search phrase or two and find yourself getting a lot of results which have nothing to do with your search goal. Say you type in

+seals +ocean

(We'll assume you're having trouble remembering the word Pinnipedia) but you get page after page of sites describing "John Seals Ocean Food Restaurant " or something similar. This would be a time to filter out the results with a minus sign as in

+seals +ocean -"John Seals"

or something along those lines. In some cases, you may have to be persistant, adding a whole string of minus terms to your search, but if patiently applied, this technique will often save you a lot of time and trouble by winnowing out unwanted sites. Usually search engines will display a count of the number of results returned, so as you refine your search you can get an idea of how well you are doing at narrowing down the list. You will want to choose any "minus" terms carefully so as to avoid inadvertantly excluding desired results.

Another useful techniqe is to use example words. Say you are looking for a site on dogs, and you are particularly interested in information on the different breeds. An alternative to typing in "dog breeds" would be just list a few examples as in

"german shepherd" dachshund schnauzer collie

This technique often works well if you are looking for informational sites and can be combined with the plus sign and minus sign as previously described. For instance the search phrase

+dogs "german shepherd" dachshund schnauzer +collie -calendar -breeder -products -gifts

would be appropriate if you wanted to find sites about dogs, were particularly interested in collies, and wanted to exclude some of the commercial "dog product" sites (although to be truly useful you might want to add a lot more minus terms). It's also a good technique to use if you can not think of a word but can think of some words which would be examples of the word you've forgotten.

Hopefully you will find the foregoing ideas helpful in composing useful search phrases. There are other ways to improve your search results as well. Reading your favorite search engine's "search help" section is a good place for useful tips (if there is not an obvious button or hyperlink, searching with the phrase "search help" is usually an efficient way to find a link to the appropriate section). Google has an "advanced search" page which provides an alternative to the standard search box. As in many endeavors, the more time you spend honing your search prowess, the more skill you are likely to acquire. Happy hunting.