Try “ I’m Feeling Lucky.” This button offers more than a cute Clint Eastwood quote. Clicking it skips the whole results list and takes you straight to Google’s #1-ranked page for the words you typed. Google’s ranking system is its claim to fame, so this button gets it right a surprising amount of the time. For example, if you want to check out the academic offerings at Tulane University, type tulane and hit your Lucky button to arrive at the school’s home page.

Don’t stress over spelling. When you type in the search box, your spelling doesn’t have to be perfect. Just take your best guess. Google’s smart enough to figure it out and even offer to link you to the correctly spelled results (”Did you mean: schwarzenegger“).

Word variations count, too. Google uses a technology called stemming that looks at the basic part of your search term and can find pages with similar terms as well. If you’re looking for swimming, you’ll probably get pages with swim and swimmer as well. If you’re not getting the results you want, though, try typing in the word variations yourself, especially for more obscure words.

Skip the conjunction junction. Older search systems make you use and between words to find pages that include all of them. Google automatically searches for all words you type, but ignores commonplace words like and, the, where, how, and so on. The site also ignores single letters and numbers. Should you need to include one of these babies in your search, preface it with a plus sign (+): george +h +w bush, +the donald, and so on.