I don't think we will ever get away from retrieving thousands of results when using Google, but we can definitely use some tricks to sift through our results. Here is a table I put together for the reference department at Denver Public Library, a list of tricks/advanced commands to help retrieve better results. Many of these commands also cross over into Bing and Yahoo.
Added Tips:
+ Instructs Google to retrieve pages with the exact word specified
ex: +word
~ Instructs Google to look for synonyms
ex: ~word
" " Instructs Google to search words together rather than separately
ex: "word/s"
Happy Searching!
