The Users' Guide to Web Searching Reviews all major search engines, provides features and statistics, and suggests strategies. Web Searching Tips Provides various information about search engines. Not as easy to navigate as Search Engine Showdown. Includes links to most search engines, directories, and topic specific search engines.
Every search engine works a little different.
Therefore, it is difficult to give detailed advice about search engines in general. The best advice, that applies to almost every search engine, is to place quotation marks around the query words that should be found together. This is called phrase searching. Without the quotation marks most search engines would locate every page in its database that included the three words whether they were together or in that order. So if you conduct a search for Saturn, in the science directory of Yahoo, the results should not include Saturn the automobile.