Search tips:

• Try to use distinctive terms likely to be found only in the documents you seek.
• Use several such distinctive words or phrases.
• Use double quotation marks around phrases: e.g. "rural youth"
• Use commas to separate several phrases from each other
• Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.
• Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example, next will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a query for NeXT will only match NeXT.
• (More tips)

Internet searching tips

Greg Notess' Search Engine Showdown is a handy table outlining search engines' properties/features, and lists the search engines that are subject directories (including human-selected Internet resources arranged and classified in hierarchical topics).

Tool kit for the expert web searcher: this is an academic librarian's list of links to web subject guides, search engines, metasearch engines and search engine collections, and multimedia searching.