One year ago Google claimed to have officially indexed 1 trillion pages in its index. The exorbitant number is supplemented with the estimation that approximately 1 billion new pages are being indexed on the web with each new day. With an astronomical amount of pages on the web, it can be increasingly difficult to find what you are looking for when searching.

Statistically about 80% of all sessions on the Web begin with a search. Simply typing a phrase into a search bar can often bring random, unrelated results. We have compiled a list of six tips and tricks that will help you find exactly what you are looking for on the web.

1. Learn helpful operator functions. Operator functions allow you to narrow down your search without using the “Advanced Search” options. Essentially, you are using the Advanced Search options through the regular search bar.

Helpful operator functions:

· Site Specific: Use the “site:” operator function to search for pages within a specific site. Example: The search [site:digg.com apple] will find ‘apple’ related pages only on Digg.

· Quotations: Use quotations to find exact phrases within pages on the index. Example: The search ["health care reform issues"] will turn up only results with this exact phrase. ["health care reform" issues] will find pages with the exact phrase ‘health care reform’ and the term ‘issues’.

· Exclusion: Use a dash to exclude certain terms from your search. Example: The search [web apps -apple -iphone] will turn up search results related to web applications that do not deal with Apple’s popular Mobile Apps platform.

· Wildcard: Use the asterisk to denote a wildcard in your search. The wildcard is helpful when you cannot remember a word in the complete phrase. Example: The search [never * give you up] will turn up the lyrics to the Rick Astley song you are searching for.

2. Use a niche search engine for research. Niche search engines cater to researching a specific topic or discipline. There are niche search engines for everything from movie reviews to obituaries.

Helpful niche search engines:

· USA.gov: USA.gov gives you access to all searchable information within the federal, state, and local governments. Example: Searching for [marijuana] will turn up results related to marijuana reform and information within the government.

· Healthline: Healthline is medical information resource. To ensure accuracy, the results are filtered by medical personnel. The engine will help you find information related to symptoms, treatment options and even doctors.

· Simply Hired: Simply Hired is a dedicated job search engine that catalogs hundreds of thousands of new jobs every week. The easy-to-use site maps jobs based on location and industry.

3. Use the right-click shortcut. The latest versions of the most popular browsers allow you to select text, right-click, and then search for the phrase. If you are on the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome, select some text from this paragraph and right-click to see a quick search option.

4. Hunt Twitter for time-sensitive material. Twitter is not only popular for its micro-blogging roots, but a lot of the hype that surrounds it is for its “real-time search” capabilities. Despite all of the blather to weed through on Twitter it is still a great resource to find news on time-sensitive issues. The search bar was recently added to Twitter’s home page to enable users to faster access real-time Tweets. The recent Iran election controversy is a prominent example of how Twitter can be used to find information in real-time.

5. Search straight from the address bar. Skip out on the step of going to a search engine’s home page by typing your search phrase or keywords straight into the address bar and hitting enter. Most updated versions of popular browsers already have this feature enabled. If your browser does not have this functionality enabled, consider installing a toolbar for quick search access.

6. Utilize a multimedia search engine via LeapFish. At times you will need to visit multiple search engines to find exactly what you are looking for. You can take advantage of all the major search engines at the same time by utilizing a multimedia engine that will crawl sites, videos, news, images, and blogs. LeapFish is a great example of a light, easy-to-use multimedia search engine.