Putting quotes around a phrase is the best way to tell a search engine you want the words to appear in exactly that order. If you tell a search engine to find Cowboys football jerseys, you'd get pages that mention Cowboys, football and jerseys. If you enclose the words in quotes - "Cowboys football jerseys," pages with all the words will be at the top of the list.

If you use a site that requires Boolean operators, there are ways you can find exactly what you're looking for. Many let you use plus and minus signs rather than AND or NOT. If you were looking for some of Albert Einstein's scientific theories, but not his theory of relativity, typing in
Einstein +theory -relativity would narrow your search results.

Some search engines (such as Ask Jeeves) support natural-language queries, which means you can simply type in a question you want answered, such as, "What time is it in London?"

Try using metasearch sites. These are search pages that will send your question to many search engine pages at the same time. Most let you choose which search engines you want to query. And some, like Dogpile, let you set a maximum time you're willing to wait for results. Some metasearch sites:
Dogpile , MetaCrawler & Mamma.