Some friends and I were talking about Google’s advanced search operators over dinner at Mia’s last night (for example, with the operator “site:”, you can limit your search results to a single domain, such as “site:metafilter.com pancakes”). In any case, that’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’ve found them to be fantastically helpful toward my Google-fu.
If you’re new to all this, as a good starting-point may be this page which goes over each of the search-directives in detail.
Then, once you have your head wrapped around the general idea , you may find this straight-to-the-point quick-reference guide (with an available PDF version, to boot) more useful on a day-to-day basis.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a Google samurai, but I know my way around a handful of these search operators and I’ve found them to be remarkably helpful toward finding what I’m looking for.