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Search ONLY this site using Google:

When researching on the internet, try not to limit yourself to one search engine. Search engines regularly modify their algorithms to reduce hijacked results (sometimes works, sometimes makes things worse!) so your favourite today could serve you junk tomorrow (and be back to best next month).
The various search tools have differing sets of web pages and differing algorithms. For difficult subjects it is usually best to use two or three search engines at least. Don't use links to Ask, as they are most often associated with pre-redirects - the built in link to Ask from Opera 11 will hijack you for example- but type in the url personally.
I have found it advantageous to try some of the other search engines below instead of (or as well as) Google.

Secure Metasearch with Ixquick A meta search engine takes results from several other search engines and combines them in various ways which may be much better than one search engine alone. One of the ones I really like is ixquick which also offers a good image search.

IXquick does not track your web wanderings and offers a proxy link for every result, including https, which will strip private information that your browser may send to web sites. See Ixquick privacy. This form will use HTTPS, return up to 20 results per page and clicking a page link WILL use the proxy with the search terms highlighted on the page - clicking "unhighlight" in the top bar will remove the highlights, the bar, and return the page without going via the proxy.

Search with DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a rather special meta search engine. It will add its own filters and allow you to use a specific search engine - optionally select a specific search engine by adding to your DuckDuckGo search an exclamation and a letter or two as follows: 
 !am  for  amazon.com    or   !amuk for amazon.co.uk
 !beer  for beer advocate (type in brewery name or beer name)
 !bookmine  to search the texts of gutenberg books (enclose text in quotes)
 !bwc for  belfry web comics (family friendly version)- Any (none adult) comic on the www.
 !gn   for google news            !imdb for the internet movie database
 !w   for wikipaedia              !yt   for youtube
   (eg !g searchterm will search ggl for searchterm - 
         and ddg add their own filters to the results to improve them)
  You can also add in the box:    sort:date   to sort by date

Search Google with Startpage Startpage is a Google scraper which claims not to record your IP address. They do set a 90 day cookie which you can refuse. If you wish to set preferences, they have also implemented them via an extra hidden field. (duckduckgo uses a longer URL). This form will use HTTPS, return up to 20 results per pageand clicking a page link WILL use the proxy with the search terms highlighted on the page - clicking "unhighlight" in the top bar will remove the highlights, the bar, and return the page without going via the proxy.

Search Wikipedia

Search Yahoo (Yahoo uses Bing which is MS).
NOTE: Unlike other search engines Yahoo does NOT support HTTPS secure protocols.

Use Google.com
NOTE 1: Google ONLY: Oct 2011 they stopped reacting to the plus symbol as in +must to force a word to be in a result. From now - for Google only - any term you must have "must" be in double quotes. This also prevents much of the stupid second guessing (but you can still get all the commercial spam pages in the results).
NOTE 2: BIG improvement Nov 2012: To stop Google's pigeons second guessing you and hiding the data you want, after an initial search, select "more search tools" and then select "verbatim". This forces the search engine to use exactly what you have typed, and turns off second guessing, results based on prior searches, synonyms and other hazards that hide what you really want. Note however you can search verbatim OR time period but not both. If you want "past week" together with "verbatim", tough. About Google Verbatim

Specialist Searches

Search text in Gutenberg books The specialist search site anacleto seems to be down, but to search on the first 100k or so of the text in books held by Project Gutenberg you can use this subset from Google:
Google Full Text:

Find an old copy of a website on The Wayback Machine Enter a URL and receive EITHER the last cached version of the page (may be a few years old) or if not available, then the latest live page. Archive.org (and waybackmachine.org) is frequently not available but reappears after a bit.
If you hit the Show All button it will only show you a page if there is one in cache, otherwise you will have to select LATEST. Works best with graphics on

Search IMDB for film and TV details     

Search in Science Fiction Encyclopedia

British Library archive of UK web sites Note that this is a selective archive and does not attempt to be a complete archive of UK web sites.
Enter Web Address: (eg www.btinternet.com/~shawweb/stephen/) :

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