Another tip that will help narrow your results is to use the + (plus) and - (minus) characters to include or exclude pages from your search.

Let's continue with our search for items about the Reformation.  Say we want to find out more about Martin Luther, the man who was pivotal in the Reformation.  A simple search on the phrase "martin luther" turns up over 250,000 web pages, many of which are also about Martin Luther King, Jr.     

A quick way to narrow it to the Martin Luther of the 1500's is to use the minus sign and search for "martin luther" -king.  This will find all documents which contain the phrase "martin luther", but do not contain the word king.  Now try this search on altavista.com and see how many documents you pull up.

When I tried this search, I got about 60,000 documents, cutting out almost 200,000 documents.  Plus, most of the documents in the first 10-20 matches are about Martin Luther of the 1500's.  Not one is about Martin Luther King, Jr.  

Conversely, if you only wanted documents about Martin Luther King, Jr. you could search for "martin luther" +king.  When I did this search it yielded about 120,000 pages of information, and every document in the first  10-20 documents was about Martin Luther King, Jr. and none were about the man of the 1500's.  

So you see how adding the simple + or - characters can instantly focus your search.

One last tip about doing the actual search: use the * (asterisk) to find words which start with the same letters, but may have different endings.  For instance, if you're looking for articles about forgiveness, you'll get more matches if you just type forgiv*, rather than the full word forgiveness.  

This is because the * indicates you want all words beginning with these letters and ending with anything else, including forgive, forgiveness, forgiving, forgiven, etc.  So use the * to get the most possible matches for your search term.

That should give you enough tips to get you started.  Let me take you to two other popular search engines and show you why it's helpful to do your search on more than one search engine.