Andy talks about getting added to Google in his recent post, something that a lot of people don't really understand.

The other thing I notice is that people don't really seem to know how to search in Google. For starters, check out the Advanced Search tips page.

Here are a couple tips I use, result counts are in parenthesis.

Quotes

When search for something like Community Server (375 mil), try putting it in quotes, like "Community Server" (1.76 mil).

.NET

Search for .NET presents an interesting dilemma as Google strips out the punctuation. Using quotes, ".NET", doesn't help either. What I have found that does help is to include the .NET keyword after what you are search for, such as MasterPages .NET (713 thou).

Exclusions

Sometimes I find myself search for development related content that applies to multiple languages. Searching for stringbuilder (2.75 mil) returns results for .NET, Java, PHP and more. If I don't want to narrow my search by including a .NET keyword, I can exclude specific keywords from the results; stringbuilder –java (310 thou).

Relevance

When searching, try to imagine what the author of the content you are looking for was thinking. This plays both ways though; when writing online content, try to imagine how the end user will search for your content. For example, my dad owns a ceramic and glassware decoration business. While he may be involved in high-temperature fire-on decals (977), most consumers are not going to use those words to find him. Suppliers and buyers may however. But consumers are going to use terms like "heirloom plate" (9780), or "collectible plates" (113 thou) or dinnerware (7.21 mil).

Specialty Searches

Keep in mind that Google has dozens of specialty search pages, some BETA, some live. You can search blogs, books, catalogs, products, news, patents, scholarly papers, videos, US government, Linux, BSD, Mac, Microsoft, and many more.

One that definitely should be bookmarked is the Google /* Code Search */ Labs BETA. This page allows you to search for public source code, using regular expressions and licensing, language, package and file filters. The Advanced Code Search page makes it a little easier. If I wanted to search for C# code that inherits the template control, I would use \: TemplateControl lang:c# (50).  If you're interested, Travis Laborde wrote a Firefox plugin for Google code search.

Unfortunately for the Visual Basic developer, all VB languages are lumped together, lang:basic. This can be largely overcome though by using a .NET specific query, such as Inherits Page lang:basic (600) or "Inherits Page" lang:basic (100).

Hopefully this has given you some insight to find what you are looking for. Now if you'll pardon me, I need to go find an answer to "Windows 2003 Server" hibernate 0xc000009a (30).