Once you have decided upon a search engine, and discovered how to accurately specify your query, how can you filter those thousands (or even millions) of results? It's important to develop an idea of which results are worth pursuing further.

Often, the search will produce many results which are unrelated to your subject, though they may include the actual terms you specified (be particularly careful with words having multiple meanings). If the search results give you some context (i.e. a portion of the web page containing the search terms), then use that to determine which pages are relevant. You can often also disregard pages because they link to other pages in sites that you've previously checked, and, depending on the subject of your search, pages that present purely personal information. Be careful here, though, because a personal page could just have a set of links that save you hours of searching (see hubs and authorities, below).