Enter Google. Used well, the search engine with the plain white homepage can quite literally bring a world of information to your fingertips. Used poorly, though, and Google can make you yearn for the days of card catalogs and harried librarians.

We’ve all had the experience of entering a search term into Google and being informed that Google found 2,684,541 results for our search – and, page after page, none of them are what we’re looking for! It’s important to keep in mind that, no matter how friendly those googly eyes in the logo look, at its heart, Google is just a machine – however well-designed, in the end Google has no human intuition or judgment to help it decide what, precisely, you’re looking for.

Keeping that in mind can help improve your search results drastically. Let’s walk through a simple search to see how. Perhaps you’re interested in the ’80s New Wave band, The Cars. Enter the word “cars” into Google, though, and you’re liable to get all sorts of links to car repair sites, auto dealerships, the recent animated movie “Cars”, and so on. The first link even remotely related to the band appears on the ninth page of results in the search I just ran – deep enough in to try the strongest patience.

Fortunately, Google gives you plenty of tools to help you better target your search. The first and most useful is to enclose a search term in quotes. Putting a phrase in quotes will only return pages where that exact phrase appears – those words in that order. So let’s try “the cars” in quotes, and see what happens… (Here’s a tip: Google doesn’t pay attention to capitalization, so save a couple keystrokes and use all lower-case letters.)

Ah, now we’re talking! The first four results I get are directly related to the band – not too shabby! It is more likely that a page about The Cars would use the phrase “the cars” than a page about automobiles or movies. Using quotes is incredibly useful when you remember a line from a song and want to find its title, or when you’re trying to remember what movie a line was from. I use it for tech support when I have a problem with my computer; if Internet Explorer won’t start, I figure someone out there who might have written up an answer for me probably included the phrase “Internet Explorer won’t start” in his or her article. (Here’s another tip: Google is so friendly, that it will even put the closing quote on for you, so you only have to put a quote at the beginning of your search phrase.)

Another way to narrow down your search results and make them more relevant is to include more search words. Instead of putting The Cars in quotes, we might have added another term, or two, or more – again, think about what words would be likely to appear on a page about whatever you’re looking for. So I might add the name of the lead singer to my search and enter “cars ocasek” (without the quotes, this time); again, the first few results are directly related to the band The Cars, although they are different from the results I got with the last search. By the way, you can mix and match these techniques, piling up terms and phrases, like this: cars “my best friend’s girlfriend”.

There are dozens of more complex ways to fine-tune your Google searches: you can use “or” to search for pages including one term or another (e.g. “cars OR blondie” will return all pages that include either word), you can use various wild cards to replace words in phrases (e.g. “she’s my * girlfriend” will return pages with “she’s my best friend’s girlfriend” but also “she’s my favorite girlfriend” or “she’s my neighbor but I wish she was my girlfriend” and so on), you can use the minus sign to exclude words from your results, and on and on. Google is a powerful computing tool, and it’s possible to build search strings that look like formulas from a theoretical physics textbook. But for almost all of the things we look for on a day-to-day basis, the techniques above, combined with a little bit of savvy about what the page you’re looking for is likely to include, will bring you exactly what you’re looking for.

To use Google Docs, you need a Google account. If you already use another Google service, like Gmail or Google Groups, you already have a Google account and can log in with your existing login. Otherwise, signing up is easy: just go to docs.google.com and click “Create a New Account”. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented the Google Docs homepage, a list of your most recent documents and links to create a new one, as well as links for settings and other site functions. Create a new document and Google will load a full-fledged word processor into your browser window. Or, you can import documents from your desktop, allowing you to access them anywhere. The interface is very similar to other word processors you’ve used, with buttons for formatting, font and style selection, and other word processing functions. While not as extensive as the options available in Word, OpenOffice, or WordPerfect, Google Docs has everything you need for basic writing and editing. You can even use many of the same keyboard shotcuts you’re used to from other programs, like ctrl-i to italicize selected text.

Once you’ve created a document, you have several choices of formats to save it in. If you select “Save” from the File menu, your work will be saved at Google Doc and accessible from anywhere. But you can also save in the Word .doc format, the standardized .rtf format, the OpenOffice .odf format, or plain text, which will download the file to your hard drive so you can open it in the program of your choice. What’s more, you can save your file as HTML to post it on the Internet, and even as a .pdf file to share your work via Adobe Acrobat Reader or the fast and quick FoxitReader. From the same menu you can print or run a word count as well as find and replace words or phrases in the body of your text.

Google Docs offers more than just a basic word processing, though. Documents are automatically saved while you’re working on them, and the entire revision history is available under the “Revisions” tab. This is especially useful for another important feature, the ability to collaborate with others on a document. Click on the “Share” tab at the right and you’ll be able to enter the email addresses of people who you want to be able to view your document, or even to edit and add to it. They will receive an email with a link to the document and instructions on adding to it. If somebody makes changes you don’t like, you can always revert to an earlier version. Your work can also be made publicly available under the “Publish” tab. Google Docs will publish the work at a Google address or, if you have a blog, can publish it directly to your blog as a new entry.

For organization of your documents, Google offers you the ability to add and search by tags. If you have a Gmail account, you might already do this with your email, but even if you’ve never heard of “tagging” documents you’ll find the concept very simple. Instead of putting a document into one and only one folder, tagging allows you to assign one, two, ten, or a hundred keywords to your documents. If, for instance, you have an essay you wrote in college, you might tag it with the name of the class, the name of the professor, the topic of the paper, and so on. Your tags become “virtual folders”, so that in one view you can see all the documents that include a particular tag – you could look at all the papers you wrote in English Lit, or you could look at all the papers you’ve written about Shakespeare, or you could look at all the work you wrote in college, or everything in a particular language, or whatever. You tag your documents according to the categories that matter to you, not according to what one folder you think might be closest to what you think is important about a piece of work.

Finally, whether you tag your documents or not, it wouldn’t be Google if they didn’t also offer the ability to apply their awesome search technology to your documents. You can search by keywords, phrases, anything you can do with Google to find things on the Internet you can do with Google to find things in your own documents. This makes your Google Docs a powerful repository not just for new documents but for your old documents as well; upload them to Google Docs and they will be fully indexed and easily available whenever you need them.

As someone who works at several different job sites, Google Docs has been an incredible tool for me. I can pick up my work from wherever and add to it, and when it’s done I can download it to my home computer. What’s more, since you can store up to 5,000 documents in your account, Google Docs provides an excellent an free off-site backup solution: I keep my dissertation and research materials there, as well as anything important I’m working on at the moment. If anything were to happen to my home PC, I can easily restore my most important documents directly from Google Docs.

With its flexibility, ease of use, and generous storage, Google Docs has bcome my all-purpose tool away from home. I use it to back up important work, to take notes when I’m on the go, to capture web pages when I’m surfing at a public computer terminal, to send documents to colleagues for their feedback, and to do editing when the ability to roll back to earlier versions is important to me. While there are a few other sites that offer online word processing, such as Zoho Writer and Writeboard, Google Docs offers exactly the right mix of simplicity and advanced features for me. And even when I’m not writing, it’s comforting to know that it’s there, waiting, as soon as – and wherever – I need it.