Here are a couple of tips to help you use Google more productively. Google supports many advanced search criteria to refine a search. This Google page gives you an overview of the available criteria. The two criteria that I use most frequently are “this exact phrase” and “search within a site”. Let me give you examples of how I use these features.

When I’m trying to figure out the cause of a particular error message that I receive in Adobe Photoshop, I go to Google’s Advance Search page  and type in the exact text of the error message in the “this exact word or phrase” box. This reduces the number of results that Google displays since typically Google does a search on any of these words. Additionally, I further refine my search by typing in adobe.com in the “Search within a site or domain.” As a result Google only shows me web pages from Adobe.com that contain this exact error message. I would expect to receive a number of pages from Adobe’s tech support pages and from user discussions pages which contain references to this error message. Using Google’s advance search features I can find the information that I’m looking for more quickly.