While Google isn't in any danger of being dethroned as the go-to search portal of choice for most people, results on the site are definitely more hit and miss than they used to be. A typical Google results page these days is packed with advertisements, recommended results, and websites that are the best at search engine optimization rather than the most reliable, accurate answers to your questions.

To get good results out of Google, you need to go beyond simply typing out a few keywords and hoping for the best. Using the tips we've outlined below, you should be able to find what you're after faster and more easily.

One of the most effective ways to narrow your search is to put your search terms inside quotation marks: From song lyrics to movie titles, this can cut a lot of the clutter from results pages, because Google knows exactly what you're looking for. It's particularly effective when the keywords in your search aren't often used together.

By putting a minus ("–") sign immediately before a keyword, you can exclude results that include that word. This works really well when you want to avoid a particular association that your other keywords have, or you want to filter out a news story that's dominating the headlines (and the search results.) On the flip side, add a plus ("+") sign in front of words you definitely do want to include and match (by default, Google can treat some of your keywords as optional.)

In general, the more keywords you use in your search, the better. You may think that Google knows what you're looking for just from one or two terms, but you'd be surprised at how much better the results are if you are more specific. This can really help when you're getting a lot of hits that aren't closely related to what you hope to find.

A lot of the time you'll want Google to scour the entire web for search results, but not always. If there's a particular site you want to look at or that you trust above all others, type site: followed by its main URL after the keywords you're looking for. Google will return only results from that specific domain.