Web searching has been compared with locating a nugget of gold in a field the size of Kent! Searching can be complicated as you have to guess the text suitable Web sites may contain and search engines work in various ways. The following approaches work on nearly all the common engines, except where stated:

Attention to these aspects will improve search success:

Select search terms - decide which words should occur on the target page
Use a phrase search - one of the most effective quick search techniques
Combine search terms - combine broad and narrow search terms
Removing unwanted sites- exclude sites by use of - or NOT
If at first you don't succeed - try another engine, or another approach

Select search terms

Select six to ten terms that describe your area of interest. Look for terms that have a unique meaning, dungeon may be better than castle as the latter may also be a place name. Kent has several meanings, there is a Kent State and Kentucky in the USA and it is also a common surname.

Broad topic terms such as bird will return far too many results on their own (Google returns 392,000 hits!). However bird will make sure that a narrow term such as osprey has the meaning you require (9640 hits). Try bird in combination with webcam (1540 hits). Even better is bird webcam osprey returning only 31 well focussed hits from Google.

Generally avoid capital letters, which searchers sometimes add automatically, as a leading capital letter requires that the word starts a sentence, or is a name. Do use capitals for proper nouns eg. George Formby.

As punctuation (including spaces) is usually ignored or considered a word separator by search engines, the best search terms may be real words rather than symbols. To search for 1000 B.C. make the symbols into a phrase "1000 B.C." or "1000 BC"

Spelling needs to be considered as there are regional variations color colour and sometimes several accepted spellings mediaeval medieval.

Is a phrase search appropriate?
Adjacent words and phrases are very effective (the quote marks are essential).
"Key Stage 1" -  a difficult theme to search for, also try "KS1" 
"motte and bailey" -  a very specific search for mediaeval castles.
"Loch Garten" - is a very specific location for watching ospreys

Phrase searches work with every search engine mentioned in Search Hints including Google. Phrase searches can be combined with other search techniques - see later.

Try combinations of search terms

Try combinations of two or three search words. Most search engines return sites that contain all the search words first.

To insist on a particular word, place a plus sign immediately before the vital word (ie space before but not after the +) eg +history +Dover +Museum

For complex searches, use Boolean operators AND, OR
These operators are usually entered using capitals, but use varies between engines.
eg. revolution AND Russia AND Lenin

Brackets may be used to clarify complex searches:
eg. (history OR archaeology) AND Egypt

Phrase searches can be combined with additional search terms:

"Key Stage 3" +rivers

Sometimes there are two ways to express an idea, OR will include both:

("Key Stage 1" OR "KS1") AND literacy

Alternative spelling may need to be incorporated in a search:

(mediaeval OR medieval) AND food

Removing unwanted sites

A search was carried out for naval sailing ships using the Fast search engine. A search on "man of war" produced 9,600 sites including sites about war games, dogs and jellyfish as well as the sailing ships wanted.

A search with the combination "man of war" -games -dogs -portuguese reduced the results to 7100.

A combination of essential terms with terms to remove the unwanted brought the best result: "man of war" +ship +sail -games -portuguese with 1067 results.

NB Google does not support most of these combinations, it assumes all the words are essential (as if there was an AND between each term). For information about the NOT operator, see the site help page as its use varies widely.

If at first you don't succeed...
Select two or three search engines and build expertise in their use. It is worth reading the help pages in detail.

Each engine has its own way of indexing sites and of matching the sites with your search terms. Trying a different engine with the same search will often bring new results.

You may prefer the way results are presented by particular engines. Compare Fast, Infoseek, Excite and Hotbot.