Use the Least-Common, Most-Likely Words to Match Your Result 

Let's say you're looking for a review of the Mel Brooks movie "High Anxiety".  You could try a generic search like "movie review sites" and have to wade through hundreds of results before you found a site that had a review of this older Mel Brooks film.  You could also search for "Mel Brooks" but given the man's very prolific career, you will probably have to wade through a lot of his other information to get to a review site.  So, in this case, the best thing to ask Google to find might be "review Mel Brooks High Anxiety" (without the quote marks).  This uses the less-common words "high anxiety" and the most likely word "review" to find your result.  In this example, Google gives us a review of the movie on the first page.

You might have to try two or three searches to decide what the best words are for the topic you're seeking.  For example, if you were looking for lyrics to a song you heard on the radio that included the line "you know I couldn't last" because you wanted to know who sang it, I'd recommend including the word "lyrics" in your search.  The reason for this is that this phrase contains a lot of commonly used words that would appear on many web pages.  Adding "lyrics" to the search term tells Google to narrow it down to pages with the word "lyrics" associated with them.  Since this is a song lyric you're thinking of, that will help.  Narrow down the results.  For example "couldn't last lyrics" will give you two main results, the song "You know I couldn't last" by Morrissey and "Couldn't last a moment" by Colin Raye. 

Careful use of Quotation Marks

It's not too widely known, but Google attaches a special meaning to quotation marks when you type them into a search box.  For example, looking back at that song lyric search above, you could enter the exact line of the song you heard, place it in quotes, and add "lyrics" to it.  This would take you to the best possible result for the search, which happens to be the Morrissey song.

Quotation marks can really help if you're looking for something very specific, too.  For instance, maybe you once read about a review of the movie "High Anxiety" that you saw years ago.  You can't remember much about it, but you'd like to find that review again because the phrase "your driver and sidekick" sticks out in your mind for some reason and you want to know why.  The best way to find it again might be the following search query (this time, typed exactly as shown below, with the quotes):

 "High Anxiety" review "your driver and sidekick"

This tells Google you're only interested in pages where the exact phrases "High Anxiety" and "your driver and sidekick" appear.  You'll find that this search results in a single article, a review of the movie from the New York Times.

This can be helpful also when searching for help for computer error messages, information about specific people by name, etc.

Use the Right Google Search

The "plain old" Google search that you get by going directly to http://www.google.com/ will find about anything you're looking for.  But if what you're looking for is something more specific, like a picture of a 1957 Buick, using the Google Image Search would be a better option.  Instead of having to wade through lots of written material about 1957 Buicks and having to find a decent picture of one, Google Image Search will limit the results you get to images only.  Instead of a page of search results listing lots of articles, you'll get a page full of thumbnail pictures of 1957 Buick automobiles, which is what you were looking for.

Similarly, if you're looking for information about a book, Google Book Search can be of more help than a "normal" Google search.

There are other Google searches as well, for things like Scholarly papers, maps, shopping, etc.  The extra couple of clicks it can take to get to these resources (most of which are available through the "More>>" link on the Google homepage) can save you a lot of time in sifting through the results you don't want to find the ones you do.

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If you have had particularly good success using a technique I've not covered here, please feel free to email me (see the "Feedback" link on the home page for my email address) and I'll include it here when I get a chance.