The "how" is more important than people usually guess. You can get higher quality results by using tools such as exact matches and searching by date, over a naive Google for basic search terms.

One technique I use often is inspired from "stemmatics", I've got a short write-up with worked example on G+. Another example is my results for this question on LW.

Another useful technique is knowing how to exclude some search results; NOT operators can be incredibly useful, eg when one of your search terms is very common in a domain not related to your query's domain.