The web is a big place, full of natural resources--well, ok they're all man-made--and chances are very good that you can find something about most anything you are looking for. If you can't, it's either super obscure, and nothing has been written on the topic--unlikely, but possible--or you just aren't looking for it in the right way. This will be the first in a series of posts to help you better find what you are looking for. I make no guarantees on the frequency of these posts, but I will put stuff up as I think of it. All of these posts will be in the "Web Search" category so you can view them all there.
My first tip is to search on synonyms of a word. If you aren't getting the results you want, fire up the thesaurus and look for other words. Search engines are getting better at figuring out spelling errors, but they aren't always great about suggesting alternate words--especially when they can produce some results for your original search terms.
Let's try an example. In this "hypothetical" situation (the statue of limitations is past, and I'm not telling who this was...), I have a friend that has a Sony Vaio laptop. Somehow the monitor on it gets cracked, and I am asked to help fix it. I know that there are replacement parts available out there, so I do a quick search for "Sony Vaio replacement monitor" [Google] [Yahoo!]. For this example, we are going to ignore the ads; we'll talk about that another time...
Notice that on the first page of results, we get some links to Sony, but not their parts division (do they have one?), Amazon trying to sell us a new Vaio, reviews on shopping.com, but not a whole lot of answers for replacing the monitor. Let's think for a few moments about how we can make this better... We know that we have a Sony Vaio, and there aren't too many other things that a Vaio is called. We can try putting in the specific model number, but that may not help too much. What are we trying to do? We're trying to get a replacement part. We can search for "Sony Vaio replacement parts" but that may or may not be specific enough. What part are we looking for? The monitor. Hmm... What else can we call it? LCD? Display? Screen? Let's try searching for "Sony vaio replacement display" [Google] [Yahoo!]. The first few results on both Google and Yahoo! get us to some replacement parts vendors.
Phew. Crisis averted. Now we can order up a new LCD, fix the laptop, and make our friend happy. It was as simple as changing a word or two, and we get a completely different set of search results.
