If there's one thing you can count on with search engines these days, it's receiving a lot of results to your search. But what can you do to improve the quality of those results? Here are a few tweaks you can make to your search to improve the quality in most cases:

1. Search for your phrase in quotes: If your search has more than one word and one results with more than one word use concurrently are relevant, put those words in quotes. For example:

blue man group (93,000,000 Results)

returns results from every site using the words blue and man and group in any order. You could tighten this up by putting quotes around the first two words like this:

"blue man" group (7,010,000 Results)

or around all three:

"blue man group" (6,620,000 Results)

to narrow your search to more relevant results.

2. Use negative keywords: What if you're searching for a blue man that isn't associated with the Blue Man Group? Searches for "Blue Man" would probably have a lot of false-positive results for the blue guys in Vegas. However, you can easily filter the "Blue Man Group" results by setting a negative for the word group, like this:

"blue man" -group   (321,000 Results) Wow, people don't say "blue man" without the word group very often.

3. Search Page Titles Only: Let's say you're interested in pages about the Blue Man Group, but not sites that just happen to mention the group in passing. You're looking for entire pages dedicated to the performance artists. Can that be done? Yes, using the allintitle tag, like this:

allintitle:"blue man group" (96,800 Results)

If you haven't used the above tricks but think they're valuable, be sure to use each technique seven times right now so you can add the tricks to your knowledge base.

For those who use Google every day, but would like to make better use of this powerful site, pick up a copy of the book Google Hacks. Rael Dornfest and Tara Calishain break down tip after tip on how to take your Google searching to another level. It's a great book to pick up for 5 minutes a day to learn and train yourself on another valuable search trick.