Chapter 8. Searching Annoyances

Quick, answer this question: do you spend more time on the Internet searching for things or actually finding them?

I thought sosearching. After all, it's easy to type a few words into a search box, but it's tough to actually find anything you want. And that's no surprise. The Internet is a big, big place, filled with billions of pages of text, not nice, neat, indexable database records. Crafting the right search criteria for each different search engine, accommodating their quirks and limits, learning their arcane syntaxes, pawing through paid results looking for the real thing, is... well, bloody annoying. It's amazing we ever find anything! There's a wealth of information out there, though, and the tips within this chapter will show you how to bend the search engines to your will and track down whatever you're looking for.