See Choose the Best Search Engine for more tips on selecting the best search tool for your needs. Most people would either laugh, or ask questions to find out what the person was talking about. Good queries are rich in keywords that can narrow the focus of a search. Most search engines handle natural language queries quite well. In fact, sentence structure can provide valuable clues to the search engine that might be lost if you only enter a few search keywords.
Most search engines are case-sensitive.
This means you'll get much better results if you capitalize names, places, and other proper nouns. Obviously you shouldn't make dumb mistakes. Take a look at Seven Stupid Searching Mistakes to see some of the real doozies made by even smart, well-intentioned people. These are fairly basic tips. For more advanced tips, from when to use Boolean logic to what to do when search engines fail, read on.