I’ve been using search engines for twelve or thirteen years now, and before that, I was doing searches on the old CompuServe online network.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about searching for specific things on the Internet. I remember Alta Vista being one of the better early search engines. Then came google.com. I had been very loyal to Alta Vista against many competitors, but after about five minutes on google, I practically never used Alta Vista again.

Despite the fact that the WWW has been popular for almost fifteen years now, I am amazed at how often I find people who are unable to effectively ‘google’. I get called on my friends many times to help them find things. I tell them, “Just google it” and they say, “But I did and I couldn’t find anything!”. Ninety-nine percent of the the time, I just key in a string of search text and boom — first page has exactly what they need within the first five hits or so.

Apparently, I need to buy everyone copies of Google for Dummies or something.

Here are some quick tips though:

• Put unique phrases in quotes.
  Remember that every word you enter must be on the page to get a hit.
  There are a lot of cool options on the Advanced search page. Don’t be afraid to use them.
  And they have a lot of tips on google itself to help you.