STLQ

:: Lisa Guernsey, writing in today's NYTimes, offers a number of web searching tips and tricks in her article, "Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait".

The notion of a user's manual for search engines might seem counterintuitive. Give people an empty search box and a button to click on and somehow they know exactly what to do.

But as the Web gets larger and more complicated, encompassing PDF documents, movies and audio files, product databases and ever-changing pages, it can help to know a few tricks that are not so obvious.

Guernsey isn't speaking to the converted in this article, but the article serves as a nice summary and refresher of what a lot of us may already know, especially as we prepare for large numbers of instruction sessions in the next few weeks.