More results is not necessarily better. What’s more important is that the results returned are relevant to your subject. Now you might think, “Of course they’re relevant. I know the subject and I did the search.”. If, however, your search terms include words that are not specific to your subject and can be easily associated with some other similar subject, you will see a lot of junk that has nothing to do with your subject matter. It will also take you a long time scrolling through a lot of extra results to try to find the ones you actually care about. Hence, efficiency in web searching makes your searches more accurate and faster.

Techniques for Efficient Web Searching
• Unique Search Terms – Use whichever words best describe your subject. If you’re searching for the Wikipedia entry for “caterpillar” the insect, just typing “caterpillar” will bring up a page of results mostly devoted to the company Caterpillar, Inc. You would then need to spend a few extra seconds scrolling down the page to look for the insect.
  If you instead search for “caterpillar bug”, it should be the very first result returned. And typing a few extra letters is much faster than scrolling down the page to look at results.
• Site Search – If you’re looking for something on a particular site, you could save yourself some time by identifying the site in the search engine so only results from that site are returned. It might seem like just typing the site name as a search term would do this, but since search engines use each word as a separate search term, you will get results that are not useful to you.
  For example, a standard search for “2005 volvo wagon” will bring up a lot of results from sponsored sites and other professional sites which sell used cars, provide resale value information (like Kelley Blue book or Edmunds), and also link to used car sites. If you want to search specifically on Craigslist, however, searching for “2005 volvo wagon craigslist” will bring up results from craigslist, but they will be in geographic areas not necessarily relevant to you. Assuming you’re in Los Angeles, if you search for “2005 volvo wagon craigslist los angeles”, you will have many results from the craigslist los angeles site, but as you page through the results, you’ll notice some are for other sites which have to do with “los angeles”, but not “craigslist”, or vice versa. The only way you can ensure you are only searching within the craigslist site for los angeles is to either go to that site and then search, or to use the search term, “2005 volvo wagon site:losangeles.craigslist.org”. The first way works, but the second way is faster. And we like faster.